Making the Old New Again

The one aspect of making imagery I have enjoyed the most lately is drawing on the thirty or so years of photographs that I've already taken. So often now the images I work with are derived from photographs exposed 10, 20, or 30 years ago. These images lie boxes as an original negative, color slide or print waiting for me to dust them off (literally sometimes)and remake them.


Many of these images never did justice to their original conception and failed as formal artistic statements. Such images are waiting to be reclaimed, mixed with other equally failed misfires into a final idea that allows their intrinsic beauty to be finally realized.

I shoot more new images today that ever before, but often edit more. Digital makes for more shots, shots that I would have never taken in the days of $10 a roll Kodachrome. Digital does help with one thing, however, that use to haunt me, looking for images that are substantive in the brain, but never actually were snapped.



The primary problem with taking so many pictures becomes one of finding what you are looking for when you need it. Shakespeare said it best:"You can't see the forest for the trees." If the experienced could offer one piece of advice to the young it would be this: "Take a few minutes to organize and annotate your images as you make them. In the days of roll film and prints, it was harder to lose things. Today with digital, if you fail to create order you will have no idea what, when, where, or how as your hairline gradually climbs your head like the tide on a twilight beach,"

The bounty of the past awaits those that stick with it, but remember sometimes finding where you have been is more difficult that those first steps.