I'm assuming that Sally works roughly the way I do, which is groping around in the dark a lot.
I feel like I want to record something, to say something about.. an object, a scene, an idea. So I take some pictures and try stuff out. After a while, if I'm lucky, something gels. Usually some sort of list of things like the following seem to me to be good for what I am trying to do.
- a set of materials to use
- an approach (literally) to the subject - how I frame it, where I put the camera
- some notion of how to render the final pictures (contrast, color, cropping, whatever)
This is somewhat fluid, and may not really fully settle down until the project is fully shot.
All this creates a commonality of appearance, or at least some sort of flow. They don't always look the *same*, there might instead be a progression or something. But there's flow and connection, one photo to the next, once the curation and editing is complete.
But it begins with groping around almost at random, for a subject, for an idea, for the materials, for the visual idioms, that are going to come together.
You definitely CANNOT recognize my work from a single picture. You might from the finished product, but that mainly because it's in some handmade book thing full or murky photos.
Is the word "style" applicable in here someplace? Well, the way I use it, sure. What relationship does that have with, say, Rembrandt's "style"? I dunno. I do know that as a photographer I have the luxury of changing stuff up to suit my mood and the subject or whatever I like, as often as I like. Rembrandt had less scope for this purely on the grounds that paintings take a long time.