March 2010: Delete

What a great button the “delete” button is. I am sometimes envious of photographers using digital cameras because the equipment allows for instant feedback as well as removal of images that don’t work. For myself, working with traditional equipment and film I don’t see what’s on the film until long after I’ve left my subject. As I’ve written before, for me this is a good system. I like (and need) the separation of time and space between making an image and evaluating the processed negative because it allows me to see my work from a bit of distance. This “distance” brings opportunity to both evaluate the merits of the negative as well as decide where to take the image with printing. However this way of working has certain limitations, not the least of which is a tendency to hold on to negatives long after their shelf life has expired!

One of my “intellectual” goals of many years has been to bring some sort of order to my negative collection. I was trained in the tradition of the newspaper photographer where every image is saved because you never know when an old image will become useful with a breaking news story. In large format photography negatives tend to get saved for the shear cost and effort it took to make the images. There is also the (slightly) competitive idea that the one who dies with the most negatives must in some way be the better photographer. Perhaps the undisputed champion of this theory is Gary Winogrand who died with hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls of film left undeveloped. My small archive of thousands of large format negatives shot over the past thirty years of work is neither as large or untamed. At the very least, most of my film is at least processed. Further, I’ve maintained that I had organized them by which were “good” negatives, which had “potential” and which negatives were “made along the way” to good photographs. This system served me well enough but it has grown less valuable with time.

Last summer while enjoying a quiet evening on our deck, Donna made the suggestion (once again) that we do some editing of the negatives because we were running out of storage space. At the time the suggestion sounded neither threatening nor challenging. I thought to myself that I was flexible enough to edit out some of my negatives and suggested we would do it during the dark and quiet days of winter. Well, winter came and it was time to pay the piper. On one level I knew that by “editing” what Donna meant was “throwing out”, “getting rid of”, “deleting” many of my precious, hard won negatives. Intellectually I understood this but emotionally I was not as ready as I thought. Get rid of 8×10 and 5×7 negatives? Heresy! However, the reality is the job needs to get done.

We started with the boxes of 5×7 negatives. There we stood, side by side at the light table, trashcan ready and waiting. At first it was very difficult. There was a story with almost every negative but I began to find in many cases the story in my mind was far better than the image on film. Often, I knew the idea behind the image, what I was trying to say but the image either failed to convey the message or the message wasn’t worth conveying. Many of these treasured negatives were simply not good images. Perhaps they were part of the process leading to a good image but it dawned on me that I didn’t need to keep all the negatives that lead up to such a negative. When the reality of this idea hit me it became easier to throw out the weak negatives. I could get rid of the junk, throw out the baby steps and only keep the images that deserved a second, third or maybe fourth look. If the negative was boring or flawed from the start, out they went. I am practicing looking at my negatives with a more discerning eye and keeping only the best. I don’t need to keep negatives that will never see the UV light box cluttering up my physical or mental space. I would much rather go out and make new negatives to print than be weighted down by boxes of old negatives I think I “should” print.

Though the process of editing out the negative collection is still “in progress” I feel good about it. In addition I have found myself more frequently going out to shoot each week this winter. Though it will never be as “fast” a process as the digital approach, I too now have a “delete” button. It is the 20-gallon trash can in my darkroom.

Tillman Crane.