Going through the archives

Why is it that we almost never look back properly?

Our photographer recently performed, or at least started, a long-planned task: the Portfolio Review.  The aim was to look through his many years of pictures and work out overall what he’d done.  That is, he wanted to know more exactly what kinds of pictures he took, what succeeded, what themes he could identify, maybe what he tried but didn’t work.

In theory this kind of thing should happen a lot.  The main (maybe only) reason for taking a picture is to look at it later.  In practice, it’s almost never done.  Almost all film pictures were glanced at once, then tossed into the box under the bed; almost all digital pictures are glanced at once, and then left to clutter up their storage drive.

It’s not always and absolutely a bad thing, this lack of review.  You may want no more from your smartphone camera than something to show around for a moment.  And most shots, film or digital, really aren’t worth the effort of preserving.  Even the very best photographers only classify a small proportion of their exposures as worth keeping.

But if you have any ambition for your photography beyond the moment’s selfie, you need to do at least the minimal review.  Unfortunately, as we’ve noted, that’s one thing that the march of technology has made harder, by vastly increasing the number of images to look at.  Beyond that, if you want to improve your photography (and it’s up to you what “improve” means), you really need a good, long look at what you’ve done.

For our photographer, that could have been an impossibly daunting project.  He’s been pushing film through cameras for decades, resulting in images numbering many thousands, and most (remember) not worth looking at twice.  The time required, not to say the tedium involved, might have precluded even starting.

But luckily, long ago he adopted a sort of first-look process.  As each roll returned from the processor he examined it, and picked out which pictures (if any) were worth printing at a larger size.  These he collected in photo-albums, maybe a couple of years’ worth of chosen shots each.  The albums take up several feet of shelf space and mostly gather dust.  But going through them is far easier and enormously more enjoyable than examining decades of proof sheets.

He now has pages of handwritten notes about themes and ideas, and the albums have many post-it notes marking pictures to return to.  It’s only a start, he says.  He’ll have to go through them all again, and then refer to the original proof sheets for confirmation, and to get access to the right negatives.  We may present further processes and results later.

If you’re going to improve, you have to look back.  And if the task looks almost impossible, it helps to have some of it already done.