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First, let me emphatically state that I blame no one but myself. No one talked me into this situation, and it’s my responsibility to now deal with the consequences.
Just to clarify, I’m referring to the stacks (and stacks) of Light Impression’s boxes that hold some fifteen hundred finished prints in my personal archives that I made under what I now consider to be false premises. You see, in my youth, there was a paradigm for fine art photographers that we all accepted as the inevitable path of pursuing a fine art career. Turns out, this was a myth.
The short version is simply that we needed to produce work not only to develop our skill and abilities, but also to build some sort of inventory. That way, when we were discovered by the king-makers of the art world, we would have in our possession sufficient images to instantly fulfill the market demand and voluminous exhibition opportunities.
Yeah, right. Sounded good and I wanted to believe it. Too bad it’s all hogwash.
In our naivete, so many of us jumped in with both feet and started amassing our precious archives. Fast forward fifty years and suddenly here I am entering the downsizing phase of life, faced with an overwhelming challenge to deal with all of these prints. I probably have, dutifully preserved in my archives, 15 to 20 times the number of prints I’ve ever sold in my entire life. Said another way, it has taken my entire life to sell one twentieth of what I currently own. Even the mathematically challenged will realize that the odds of my selling these stacks of “inventory” in my remaining years are just about zero.
But, in the spirit of true confession, it’s even worse than that. As I’ve begun this serious downsizing project, I spent an evening examining the contents of a dozen or so of those boxes of archived prints. Why I thought it was necessary to make ten copies of an image is still a mystery to me. But that mystery compounds itself when I ask the deeper question, Why did I think it was so necessary to make 10 copies of a really bad image? — and most of them are. They were, obviously, made in my youth when both my craft and sense of aesthetics were immature and quite suspect.
What do I do with all of these prints? Seriously, I’m looking for an answer. The obvious one of tossing them in the landfill just seems overtly depressing. Come to think of it, a giant bonfire might be a better idea because at least I would derive some comfort by being able to roast a few marshmallows while my life’s work goes up in flames.
Fortunately, in the midst of all these discouraging thoughts, a hilarious scenario developed from a slightly different angle. In my office, there exists a two-drawer filing cabinet that contains my lifetime of accumulated darkroom printing notes. Dutifully following the advice of such masters as Fred Picker and Ansel Adams, every time I went into the dark room to work out the steps required to print a negative, I kept meticulously documented notes so that if I ever needed to reprint that image, I’d have a reasonable starting point. I kept little maps of every step in the dodging and burning of a negative, which dodging and burning tools I used (I had them numbered by various sizes and shapes), such practicalities as the paper and developer I used, as well as the enlarger height (accurate to the millimeter), and of course enlarging lens, aperture, and total exposure times. If you were to approach me with the request to purchase a print that I originally produced in, say, 1975, but no longer had in inventory (fat chance), I could head to the darkroom with my printing notes and make a print for you with considerably less fuss than starting from scratch. Well, except that I no longer have a darkroom, the paper I used at the time hasn’t been manufactured for 20 years, the developers I mixed from scratch can no longer be purchased without approval from the Hazmet authorities, and I’m not sure anymore where I would go to buy an enlarger. Other than that, I’m sure my printing notes would be handy.
And that brings me to the rest of the contents of the two-drawer filing cabinet which includes of all the contact sheets made for the roughly 40,000 negatives I produced in my film days. In reviewing a number of these contact sheets, I came to the realization that they not only provide little benefit to my current creative life, but in fact they could be used by nefarious individuals to blackmail me for everything I own. Come to think about it, that might actually be useful in my downsizing process.
And that brings me to my negatives. Clearly, I could destroy all my archive prints and those reference contact sheets and not ultimately lose anything of value in terms of future production — as long as I preserved the negatives. In theory, my negatives are a repository of content, content, and more content that I could access even today with the help of a scanner or by simply re-photographing the negatives so I could make new prints. If they actually were filled with content, content, and content, I have no doubt this theory would work. If only …
But then the pragmatist in me wakes up and asks if I ever have scanned old negatives or am I likely to ever want to do that. Keep in mind, most of this work was fairly primitive in terms of my technical competence and embarrassingly primitive in terms of my aesthetics. Then why am I so resistant to disposing my negatives? Is there something I haven’t thought of? Is it just for the sense of personal history or visual diary that I cling to them? Or is it simply an indication of how deeply I swallowed the hook, line, and sinker in my formative years?
Of course, there is an option I haven’t mentioned yet, which is to simply ignore the issue entirely, proceed with making even more archives that will require eventual disposal, but blissfully pass on all of these decisions to my unsuspecting heirs. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again: there isn’t a week that goes by in my life when I don’t receive a phone call, a letter, or an email from some photographer’s offspring or relative who asks me what the options are for dealing with dear old Mom or dear old Dad’s artistic archive. I can honestly say it never dawned on me when I started photography that my lark into the world of art would generate such a burden for my family.
So how did this conundrum begin? It seems to me — and I’ve put a considerable amount of thought into this — that there are three intertwined assumptions that formed the nexus of this issue. (Of course, all of you know what they say about the word assume.)
The first assumption is that there exists an audience for photographs. Perhaps I should modify that to say that we assume there is an audience who is willing to pay for photographs. I always assumed that there was because, after all, I kept hearing about the luminaries like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston whose print prices continued to escalate, and if there was an audience for them, there should be, perhaps, someday, a proportionately smaller audience for me. Just this week, as I dictate this, there was a huge sale at Sotheby’s of Ansel Adams prints from the David H. Arrington Collection of Ansel Adams Masterworks (how do I meet this guy?). Numerous records were set for famous Adams’ images, almost all of which were in the many tens of thousands of dollars and a few came close to breaking the million dollar mark. One cannot hear such news without feeling a certain optimism about the commercial viability of fine art photography. I doubt very many of us make the mistake of conflating our sales potential with that of the most famous photographer who ever lived, but you can hardly blame us for feeling a touch of optimism that there might be some proportional trickle down that would arrive at our humble level? Well, it turns out the assumption that a paying audience exists is either not true or so minuscule as to be functionally not true.
Bill Jay once hypothesized to me in conversation that he believed there were no more than two thousand serious collectors of photography in the entire world. I’ve come to believe that Bill was an incredible optimist. Of course, my skepticism might be based in a more painful reality that my personal photography simply isn’t good enough to measure up. Although I’m sure there is a measure of truth in that, it seems to be a ubiquitous disease that infects almost every photographer I know — none of whom ever sell enough work to spit at even though they’re considerably more well known than I am. If there is a sizable market for fine art photography, its location and front door have eluded me for five decades. To be honest, to preserve my sanity, I stopped pursuing commercial success decades ago, when I realized that photography was too much fun to burden it with the responsibilities required to run a small business of selling my artwork.
The second assumption has to do with that silliness about building an inventory. If Bill was right and the world-wide club of photography collectors is only a couple thousand people, doesn’t that make the building of inventory even more absurd? Without an audience to demand it, an inventory to supply them is laughable. In fact, building an inventory that consists of multiple copies of the same image could be counterproductive to the truly creative life. Instead of spending all that time making multiple copies, doesn’t it make more sense for those of us who are image makers to spend our time making new images rather than copies of old ones? Besides, building an inventory for an audience that doesn’t exist will eventually place you in exactly the same position I currently find myself in — trying to figure out how to dispose of prints that have little chance of ever finding an audience, even posthumously.
And the third assumption is so obviously false that I can’t believe I didn’t understand it from my earliest days in photography; the assumption that the means of production won’t change. All those printing notes exist under the assumption that the materials I used to make those prints would be available for the rest of my life. But, looking back into the previous generations in photography, I’m not sure I can find a single generation where the means of producing a photograph didn’t change during the course of the photographer’s life. It seems as though each method of producing a photograph traces a bell curve of popularity. But even though we have the ability to use any technique from history, we may not have access to the materials that were used back then. I remember in my 20s being fascinated by an alternative process that required a chemical called Bitumen of Sulfate. Search as I might, I never found anyone who knew what it was, let alone where to acquire it.
Lest you think I’m depressed about all of this, I should explain that I’m incredibly liberated by being able to let go of a photographic paradigm that simply doesn’t work — well, except for a very few individuals. I’m glad for Ansel Adams’ commercial success, but once I realized that his success was his alone, it liberated me to consider my art life as something other than the proscribed formula. I embraced photography for what it could teach me about the world and even myself. I began to value photography for the connections it created — not only with those who view my photographs, but also with my fellow photographers and even this lovely planet we share. I learned that living the art life is not about what we make and leave behind, but rather about what we experience in the unfolding moments, minutes and hours of our life.
Wynn Bullock titled one of his monographs A Way of Life. I think I prefer a slight variation by considering photography as a way of being. All of this eventually led me to the important lesson that photography is not the acquisition of molecules or accomplishments, but rather a gateway to experience and, if we’re lucky and pay attention, perhaps a little knowledge and wisdom that makes life an even more joyous ride.