My new editing process
We all have or access to a smartphone. Most of us have a gallery of some sort to archive all our photos, be it an app the cloud or on social media. That's how the majority of people store and edit their photos, with ugly ass presets and filters. But like most professional photographers we store our image on our computer, external hard drives or negative film folders. With the occasional box left alone in the corner of the house or studio. For me I currently just keep a few photos stored in my wallet, so how do I edit my photos from my wallet?
When I talk about editing photos I'm not talking about dodging and burning an image in Photoshop or Lightroom. Using presets or adjustment curves. I'm talking about the first step. Selecting the good photos from the mediocre ones we took. My current process is to yes, edit them in some sort of software, of my choosing. But then not to rush out and put them on some platform, but to print them out and put them into my wallet.
I have to quickly in the past, jumped with the excitement of seeing an image and uploaded it for the world to see as soon as possible. But my older wiser self now waits a little, let an image sit and marinate. I look at them hundreds of thousands of times, before choosing which ones are truly good. And that process is keeping a collection of images on my person at all times, in my wallet.
Currently, I keep about 10 images printed out in a small enough size to fit into my wallet. And there they stay. From time to time I take them out and look at them, feel them, rearrange them and eventually kull one or two that just aren't that good for some reason. It is purely gut, instinctual and emotional. I don't care about the quality of tones or the composition, hell even the subject matter doesn't faze me most time. But if I look at them long enough, I get a sense of which ones have longevity and which ones are just another photograph.
It's a weird way of editing or should I say selecting photographs. But I love this process because it's so tactile, so personal so void of a screen or the need for batteries. And over time the photographs start to get destroyed, the ends bend, the edges fray and rip. And the surface of the photograph accumulates scratches. Adding entropy to the image, that could never be achieved on a computer. Just seeing the edges of a photograph fray and move and get damaged feels so personal to me, and important to me. Only the real world has this power. I like knowing that my photographs can be touched, held and seen on an intimate level.
This wonderful idea of holding onto my prints came from the practice of a photographer I admire, Masao Yamamoto. In a video featuring him, he was out and about taking photographs. When he pulled about a bunch of small loose prints of his own work and flicked through them. That idea, that simple act triggered in my a wanting. I wanted to hold my images instead of just looking at them. And now that has become a part of my editing process, for image selection.