gdanmitchell wrote:
2. I don’t always see the potential in images right away, and only by back to them later (sometimes much later) do I understand it. I’m continuously surprised by some of the images that I overlooked right after I made them.
Personally I find this "surprise" as the best gift when revisiting old archives.
boldcolors wrote:
Personally I find this "surprise" as the best gift when revisiting old archives.
I've pondered this phenomenon quite a bit. (And again this week, as I once again revisit archives and "discover" raw files that I originally left behind.)
I think several things are going on.
1. I know that when I come back with a large batch of photographs and go to work on them I often fail to really fully dig into all of them before I go out to shoot again and come back with more new work that demands my attention. Sometimes I tell myself, "I'll be back to these files," but then I continue to move on.
2. I also think that when I make a photograph I have some notion of what I think it will look like, but then discover in post that it doesn't do quite what I expected — in other words, it doesn't meet my contemporary expectations. But on some deeper level, I made the photograph the way I did based on a certain sort of hard-earned intuitive sense, and there is something there — just not what I thought it would be. And given some temporal distance (a year is a good start) I can come back to it and see it with fresh eyes.
Sometimes I'm actually amazed at how obvious it is that the photograph "works" when I come back much later, while shortly after I made it the image seemed like nothing special.
gdanmitchell wrote:
I've pondered this phenomenon quite a bit. (And again this week, as I once again revisit archives and "discover" raw files that I originally left behind.)
I think several things are going on.
1. I know that when I come back with a large batch of photographs and go to work on them I often fail to really fully dig into all of them before I go out to shoot again and come back with more new work that demands my attention. Sometimes I tell myself, "I'll be back to these files," but then I continue to move on.
2. I also think that when I make a photograph I have some notion of what I think it will look like, but then discover in post that it doesn't do quite what I expected — in other words, it doesn't meet my contemporary expectations. But on some deeper level, I made the photograph the way I did based on a certain sort of hard-earned intuitive sense, and there is something there — just not what I thought it would be. And given some temporal distance (a year is a good start) I can come back to it and see it with fresh eyes.
Sometimes I'm actually amazed at how obvious it is that the photograph "works" when I come back much later, while shortly after I made it the image seemed like nothing special....Show more →
