Delving into your gold mine

Are you interested in your photographic development? What are you doing to achieve this?

I imagine that - if you want to develop as a photographer (or as whatever) - you do all sorts of things to achieve this. What are the things you do? You probably watch other photographers who have similar themes or subjects as you use in their photography. Looking at them is fine, if you do this to get inspiration, to enjoy beautiful pictures, but please don't use it to compare yourself. That will only create problems. After all, no one is comparable. Studying is good, though. What choices did the photographer make to take this picture? What point of view, what settings, what is in the frame. This is incredibly insightful.

Many of you, like me, will flip through photo books. Or visit exhibitions. Or attend the occasional workshop. There are countless ways to shape your photographic development. There is one, however, that I don't know if you apply....

Delving into your gold mine

As a photographer, you go through a certain development just like everyone else. Even if you just keep photographing without external factors, you will see that, over time, you will work differently. Your interest shifts in the subjects you photograph or the way you do it. And applying all those above points to develop yourself will only make this happen faster.

But do you ever look in your own archives?

Do you remember exactly what photos you took 3 years ago? Or 5? That time when you were working on that particular project? Of which you eventually made a selection. Can you still remember the photos that didn't make that selection then? How do you feel about those photos now?

Your archive can be a gold mine of images to delve into. Images that you felt were not good enough at the time. The photographic value of which you did not yet see. After all, you have developed a different perspective on photography over time.

Try spending an evening browsing through your archives. Just by randomly clicking through some folders. Or if you have tagged your photos, search for certain keywords. Have you uploaded your photos to Google Photos? Then it's even easier to search by keywords.

Do you notice that I'm talking here specifically about viewing photos on your computer? That's right. This is because these are the images you haven't done anything with. The ones you've already printed were already of some significance to you at the time, or you wouldn't have bothered to print them.

Start mining in your gold mine. Be surprised by your own work. See what you can do with it now. Try putting together a "body of work" with old work that has not been previously selected.

I myself regularly look in my archive. That's also how I found the photo above. An image of a man walking into a building with glass walls in autumn some years ago. The reflections create an interesting interplay of inside and outside in which the lines play an important role. At the time, I did nothing with the photograph. Now this is the spark for a new project I will be working on. What that project is, or will be I will hopefully be able to show you more about in the near future.

For now, go dig!

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Next up:

New episodes of Un/Taken are coming soon.

I’ve turned a recent project ‘Descended Silence’ into a photo book. Will make a flip through video for a next newsletter.

Till next time!

Marcel Borgstijn