“New is In. Old is Out”
A week or two of free time in the office and stuff starts flying around. Boxes of stored prints and sheets of 4×5 film from my days at Brooks were the victims yesterday.
It was a fitting day to begin a deep edit of my old prints and celluloid’s. I had spent the week before pulling digital assets created over the last six months while out of the office into a master archive. There was a constant humming under my office desk.
It is a challenging but ultimately satisfying necessity. The file cabinet (old film box version) of how I used to store my assets in days past. The photography world today is a simple series of clicks, created folders, and the whole process is now complete: backed up and archived on three drives stored in three different places.
Not so much years ago. The number of places and times the boxes of my old archive have been moved and stored would put efforts to reduce my carbon foot print to shame. Seriously, I have hauled these boxes up and down countless flights of stairs and across the country several times over the last 30 years. Sad to think in the end most of it ended up in the round file sitting outside my house.
Am I a tougher editor now or just less tolerant of the clutter? Maybe I’m more ready to let go of the past archives and replace them with newer versions of my history. My taste has changed in photography. Or maybe I should say it has matured. Stuff that held value in the beginning seems now like a controlled mistake in many instances. Images that I valued in the past are pushed aside by my new current point of view and vision. I kept a nice edit of this old archive, it is my past for sure. I am not that heartless.
Whatever the case, it was a striking contrast to how this process plays out in today’s world. My current archive now sitting neatly on the desk near my cup of coffee. Volumes more work contained on a drive the weight and size of a pack of cards. Missing the analog feel of those old prints and negatives, but happy I don’t have to haul them around any more.
