From Artslope.com article about Drabbles:

Brooklyn-based photographer Bill Wadman – the mastermind behind 365portraits.com, a portrait series completed each day during 2007 – has a playful new series called “Drabbles.” Marking a departure from his more traditional portraiture work, “Drabbles” call to mind film stills, his subjects and settings leaving plenty of room for viewers’ interpretations. As Wadman says, “You get to make up the story in your head.”

Explaining the story behind the “Drabbles” series, Wadman says, “Most of the work I do is more traditional portraiture, so I wanted to try something more deliberate, more constructed. Less about the people and more about the final image. When I’m between personal projects, I tend to experiment in a few different directions and then hopefully stumble upon something that piques my interest. So late last summer I was up in Connecticut for the weekend and took some pictures set in the back of my late father’s old Chevy, which was sitting in a garage.”

He goes on, “I liked the way it looked and felt. More like film still and less like a portrait. So I setup rules for myself. They had to be landscape (wider than tall), all with the same 28mm lens, all had to use some additional lighting (not just available), none of the subjects would be looking at the camera.”

“I put out a call for subjects … most of them are strangers or distant friends of people who knew my work and such. They’re musicians, and office workers, and furniture builders, and baristas, and every other thing you can imagine. All taken in NYC. Many in Park Slope, where I live.”

“Most of the time, there wasn’t a clear idea going into it, just sort of came as we worked, which made it fun. I think the connection between them all, besides them being technically similar in look and angle of view and such, is that each kind makes you say, ‘What’s going on here?’ or, rather, ‘What just happened or is about to happen?’ And most of them are not explicit, so they lend themselves to interpretation by the viewer. You get to make up the story in your head.”