Throw away images

Back in the days of slides, before I made the switch to digital, I loved getting back my images, neatly packaged in boxes from the developer. I'd pull them carefully from their cases, lay them out on the light table, flip the switch on the table and watch the images come to life with the glow. Then the loupe came out and I'd lean over each image to examine it, check for color, focus, composition... Then I'd throw 75% of my beloved images straight into the trash.

And rightfully so. At least 75% and probably more like 90% of the images I took were garbage. But what of those images? Did they fill the gaps in the stories I wanted to tell? Or were they extraneous, adding nothing? Probably it was a bit of each, but editing, severe, heartless editing, is probably the most important thing outside of the snapping the image that we do as photographers. Now of course, I do it all digitally, and I've gotten good at it. A few days ago I made more than 200 images of my backyard birds and edited that selection down to the five images I posted here. I nixed about 98%.

What got me thinking about this was a BBC article I stumbled on today about Robert Frank's classic book The Americans. The article is about the images that did not make the cut, some of which were good images, but they failed to fit into the piece the way he had imagined. This is the importance of vision, of understanding where we want to take our art. Frank was telling the story of the American people, and some of his images, even good ones, didn't fit that tale. So he tossed them out. The article ends with this paragraph, which I like:

And this is the point - Frank had the desire and courage to throw away good frames. He had something to say, and that's the power of photography. To have a point of view at the heart of the work is what projects this photographic document to the top of the heap, even 50 years on.

Something for me to ponder the next time I pick up my camera.

Find the BBC article HERE.