Giving an account for 78,000-ish images
I’ve not forgotten about the speed of photography series, but I’ve found it difficult to work on those pieces at the moment. In dealing with a bit of photographer / writer’s block, I tried something new to dislodge it. For your consideration:
I think I’ve taken well north of 100,000 images in my life thus far. In my collection of “personal / art” photographs, at least, I have about 80,000 images. The collection spans cell phone images, my first photos taken in high school, film scans, family trips, random photography outings, my college photography work, and so on. I’ve separated out all those photos from commercial photography work. When you consider that when shooting a wedding or any other all-day event, I can easily fire of 3,000 photos and I’ve done more shoots like this than I can easily remember, it wouldn’t surprise me if the total number of photographic frames I’ve exposed is nearer to 200 thousand than 100.
This isn’t bragging or anything like that. It is a staggering number of images. I could likely cut that number by a factor of 20 and retain a healthy margin of images that are rejects and unused. If I trimmed it down by a factor of 1,000, I might get near to a list of my “desert island images”- images that would be painful to part with.
So, how do I make sense of the actual totality of images that I’ve created? The sum of images alone (not video) surpasses a terabyte, a thousand gigabytes of images (or, 1024 to be pedantic). I will avoid too many belabored comparisons other than to say if every photograph were an inch long, it would span a distance of 177 miles. Pretty crazy.
The pictures you’re seeing are not those desert island images. The images you’re seeing are the best I’ve been able to do to start to see some of these pictures again in a meaningful way. I took my catalogue of 80-thousand-odd images and created a folder in the catalog in which the photos were arranged in a completely random order. 14 years of photographs interspersed by complete chance.
So, the sequence of images in this post is just the result of a bit of scrolling around until I found a handful of images in a row I thought were rather interesting. I won’t be professing any sort of insight from these images in particular, I just thought I’d get some images out into the world in an interesting way and think out loud, just a little bit, on what having that many images can mean in one’s life and artistic practice.
First of all, it should basically go without saying that there is no other artistic media that allows this sort of output. Assuming an artistic career that would span from age 10 to 90 of a hypothetical lifespan, you would need to create about three pieces of art a day to match that number. Which, okay, sure… if you want to make really simple drawings for an entire lifetime, then sure. Also, obviously, since I made this many photos in one lifetime (thusfar) it’s clearly possible. I just go out and make a few hundred or a thousand little experiments at a time.
To further beat the drum of pedantry, it’s also important to say that I wouldn’t really consider these individual pieces of art. Sure, every photo may be unique based on the individual pixels. But anyone that’s sustained a photographic process over many years knows that a “huge number of photos” isn’t cause for boasting— it’s an artifact of the digital photography process, and basically proves that I’m lazy . I don’t generally spend a lot of time deleting totally black or out of focus photos. I air on the side of digital hoarding. I’ll let 30 photos of basically the same scene all exist together. My philosophy has always basically been that even if I take two photos of a stationary subject, one will be better than the other, even if it’s only by a fractional degree. So, one photographic idea doubles or triples or multiplies by 20
Bearing this in mind, when everything gets mixed together there’s a rather interesting effect that emerges. Ideas that got developed, for some reason, over 100 similar photos crop up again and again in sequences of photographs. Think of it like this- I took 840 photos for the “pleasere turncart shere” series- that’s 1 of every 92 photos in 78000. It’s hardly like I can’t escape it, but if I’m scrolling through this jumbled mess of photos, I’m likely to see at least a few photos from the corral series emerge occasionally.
Events, too, emerge in the same way. Photos from our wedding (taken by my wonderful friends, and edited by myself) number about 3,000- one of every 26.
So, viewing images like this becomes an interesting exercise in seeing what emerges repeatedly in life. I’ve withheld (or rather, not selected) more personal images from posting in this series, but I think it’s interesting to see the things that do emerge. It’s as close as I can get to seeing my photos from an impersonal eye. By trying to strip away the context as much as possible from the images, I get to see the things that I’ve placed enough value in to spend time photographing. This is often family and friends, and when it isn’t, I start to get at a better understanding of how I tend to compose images formally and what sorts of subjects interest me repeatedly over time.
Of course, it’s worth asking- how does putting the images in a random order remove them from a context? What context were they in before?
My image catalog is sorted at the file level in chronological order. I have folders for years and months, and then within those months I create folders based on shoots. This ends up meaning that whenever I’m searching for a specific shoot or casually flipping through old pictures, I’m looking first chronologically.
It’s not a bad way to hunt around for pictures. Knowing that I’m looking for something I took in college means that a large swath of the folders are automatically off the table to look through. Furthermore, we tend to sort our own lives into seasons mentally (at least I do)- it’s generally easy for me to remember if a photo was taken in the spring, summer, fall, or winter. From there, I only have a few folders to poke through, and most folders are named topically.
So without even having to add much metadata, I’ve got a good system for retrieving photos. The problem is that it’s also hard to be surprised by images when sorted in this way.
After all, to have landed in any given folder gets my memory jogged as to what I’m going to see. I may have forgotten individual photographs if I go back and search through the raw photos, but I’m unlikely to have forgotten the entire plausibility structure of what photographs I might find in a certain folder. In other words, if I’m clicking on a folder called “night photos 2” from my junior year of college, I’m not likely to find anything that’s deeply surprising. I’m likely to find photos from one of my many nighttime rambles.
However, when looking from one photo to the next without any ordering whatsoever, I’m not sure what I’ll find. And, to the extent that I will often end up taking similar photos, I might stumble across a photo that certainly looks like my photo, but if I haven’t used it for anything or looked at it many years, there’s a real chance that (without the prompting of everything else around it) I’ll have forgotten, on its face, when, where, or why it was taken. And yet it is my photograph.
I’m not attaching any significance to this, by the way. I’m not even really trying to give an account of how one photograph in this blog post relates to the next one. My authorial hand in this was only in making the photos and then plucking the sequence out of the randomized sequence. But, beyond that, I’m not claiming that this sequence of photographs best represents any abstract set of ideas. In fact, without any real description or further information, they don’t really describe much of anything. They’re just one of the many tens of thousands of images I’ve made in my life so far.
I guess my main motivation for sharing this is that I hope it might be interesting to you, dear reader. I don’t have much of a readership, so my audience is amorphous and hypothetical. It’s made up of real people of course- you are a real person reading this (I hope). Funnily enough, I always feel a bit of shock or surprise when someone I know mentions they read my most recent blog post. My audience is never less than the people I know, so there’s no reason I should be surprised, but at the same time, I can’t help myself. Sometimes I write or photograph with the sense that my audience is totally an abstraction, as if I were writing for “anyone”, for John and Jane Doe.
This is a faulty understanding, of course. I believe that art (and by extension, photography done for the purpose of art) is best deployed for the purpose of serving real people with aesthetic beneficence. It becomes overwhelming and parasitic to the positive reasons for making art when you turn your audience into abstractions, or try to make the audience as big as the entire world. I am quite a small person, and even 80,000 photos are not enough to encompass the entire world with all its billions of people. I think a quote from Kurt Vonnegut on writing is instructive here-
Write to Please Just One Person. If You Open a Window and Make Love to the World, so to Speak, Your Story Will Get Pneumonia
So, what are these images for?
I picked out a few photos for this post because I have always felt like someone is more likely to read my blog posts if they had pictures in them. So, I’m trying to get back to some of that simplicity with the hope that it will actually allow me to get past some “writers block” and start to write and publish again. I hope to begin to scratch at some penetrating thought at photography and art making, but I know this will take a lot longer than I ever thought it would.
Looking back at many of my blog posts from college and even high school, they were little more than travel blogs or public journal entries embellished with photos. Early on, I felt like if I had learned something and could explain it, then the whole world was learning it for the first time. I don’t know when I un-learned this, but what I took on its place was a false modesty that I had nothing of value to say, a feeling that because I had learned something from somewhere, I was not contributing anything new to say it again, as if everyone that might read what I wrote already knew it (or didn’t need to know it in the first place, or else they would have learned it).
The reason I’m writing right now is because I have learned some things about some things, and I need to practice writing. That’s not a very revealing statement, so let me try to come at it another away.
If every author had thought that it was better to not write, then no books would get written. And sure, there are many books that do not need to be written that get published every year. There are books that are simpler (or worse) versions of better books. Yet if every author gave up before even getting some words down on a page, then the books that prove to be good don’t get written.
I feel a debt of gratitude to a variety of authors and artists who have made pieces of artwork that are basically like lonely intersections in the night. Perhaps an author has stood between two worlds and reconciled two very disparate ideas, two disparate identities or shoals of wisdom into a new book. Perhaps they didn’t get the pleasure in their lifetime of knowing the impact of their work. Perhaps they enjoyed a lot of success. But at the start of it was always the positive impulse to create something and put it out into the world.
Photography (especially digital photography) is a bit of a cruel activity for someone with a brain like mine. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve done a lot of work to put a lot of pieces of something onto a table and then have to do work to close the gaps and create something which is finishedand not just a box of unorganized photographs.
Creating a big box of pieces, of raw video interviews, of research for a writing project, whatever it may be- it’s a thrilling process. Your wheels are spinning, you feel like you’re getting a lot done. But if you’re not landing the plane in any sort of tangible output, you’re not really doing much. I’ve done it before in making hundreds of notes. I’ve done it before in writing long scripts for videos that are taking years longer to realize than I thought they would. I had at least one significant breakdown and a few smaller ones when working on The Builder because it felt like everything was there in the interviews, but I was having such a hard time making it come together when editing.
Likewise, I’ve made so many photographs that have no real proximate purpose. I think that’s important. In any art, you’re not always working with the luxury of knowing where something will end up unless you’re working on commission (which is also nice). But with that often comes the sense that if I could just have a few days to organize them and string together a particularly interesting piece of writing then suddenly all the meaning, all the significance, everything would just snap into place into something wonderful.
Well, it’s frightfully easy to be crushed by that thought. Because the hypothetical wonder of this unrealized magnum opus seems to only get grander and more cruel the longer nothing is done with it. 80,000 photographs can get heavy quickly when everyone one adds a few ounces of eager and prideful expectation. It’s like check kiting of your own ego- you just make a few more images and then surely it’ll all come into view.
I’m not going to pretend that using the images in this way, in this piece of writing, in this order, whatever- is transforming or elevating them or even working with what I’m trying to say perfectly. But you are seeing the images, and I’m sharing the images, which is meaning that would not have been transacted otherwise.
An easier version of this post would have been to try to explain to you the context of each image, to traffic in nostalgia and self-aggrandizement. I could’ve tried to spin a thread between each image, talking as if my individual vision was the thing holding them all up. All I can really say about these images in their totality though is that they are images that I made at some point. I took them for various reasons, and now I’m sharing them because it seemed like they’d be good images to share alongside this piece of writing; it’s a bit of personal journaling and unformed essaying offered up in hopes of slowly dislodging writer’s block about photography.
Anyway, I had set aside 15 images for this first post. I’ve got a few more sequences of images I might do something with. I might as well end with the last image and cut it off there.
