Most of my photos are never seen by anyone. Not even my family and friends. I take a fair number of them, though nothing like what I shot twenty years ago, and only a tiny fraction ever makes it out of my computer. A photo per post on Substack, another as a postcard every month, a few in a zine every once in a while, that’s pretty much it. I didn’t grow up in a social media world, I don’t feel that I need to constantly share to exist. The rest lives on hard drives. I edit them, sometimes print them, put them in books, and nobody knows any of it happened. That’s entirely on purpose.
I don’t call my photographs my work (I’ve said before that I hate the word, but I’ve never found a better one). For me, work means something very specific: it’s what I’ve shared. The photos that crossed from my private world into someone else’s consciousness.
Once a photo crosses into the world, it stops being mine to revise. I could reprocess the file because I have new ideas or I learned new techniques, but it doesn’t matter: I can’t update the copy in people’s head, and the version that someone saw is the version they keep forever. Once a photo is shared, it’s done: it can be collected, discussed, ignored, or stolen. It’s no longer yours.
Everything else is practice. It’s all the invisible photos, all the potential master pieces (hum!), all the processing left to do. It’s the hidden part of the photography craft iceberg.
Unshared photos are still in flux as far as the world is concerned. They’re potential that hasn’t realised into work. As long as they haven’t been seen by anyone, they haven’t become fixed objects yet. Even a printed photo can be reprocessed and reprinted, and you can destroy the evidence of previous incarnations if you want. Nobody will know.
I’m aware that work in the artistic tradition tends to mean total output: everything ever made by the artist, including the notebooks, the sketches, the failures rotting in a drawer, the boxes of negatives and the unfinished canvases. That’s not how I use the word. For me, work implies an exchange, a contract of some kind between a producer and a consumer. Something is made, it enters someone else’s experience, and that transaction is what freezes the object in its current state. From then on, the photo isn’t entirely yours anymore.
The crossing doesn’t have to be done deliberately by the artist, and for example in Vivian Maier’s case, it wasn’t: her photos went unshared her entire life to eventually shared, and now they’re firmly part of a body of work she will never know exists. Posthumous exchange is still exchange. By my own definition, her photographs were practice her whole life, and the crossing that converted them into work happened without her. My own photos may yet become work after I’m gone, without my say-so. I have no control over that.
So work only exists when there is sharing. That’s why most of my photographs are only practice and will remain that way.
#Photography #IMayBeWrong #Opinion