Sitting at home on a dismal day, with the rain blowing against the window, I thought I'd explore the photographs sitting unused on my backup drive from last March. This is never a waste of time. As photographer Pradip Malde wrote on his blog recently, "It is strange how the work has already been done, but it takes a while for mind to catch up, to see what was seen; a mode of growth that may be particular to photography".
I am not a "spray and pray" photographer. Last March, I took 412 photographs in total, which is hardly anything for someone who photographs every day with a digital camera. Even so, when my hand and eye are in tune, they often "see" things my conscious brain isn't quite ready for -- it might take a year or more for it to catch up. "So that's what they were on about!" The thing is, the camera just does what it's told. "What that? OK, if you say so!!" The faithfully recorded image will sit there until I'm ready to see what I saw.
Sometimes, I can't believe the riches I have passed over. Generally, this is because I was in the middle of building a sequence, and good things got left to one side as irrelevant or inappropriate to the task in hand. Or it may be because the new things felt stale at the time -- been there, done that -- but, in retrospect, may turn out to be the best examples yet of a familiar personal concern.
1 comment:
Lovely palimpsest-esque stuff. I too like to prowl through old work, to see the details I didn't catch at the time.
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