How photographers comb through own work

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Hassasin

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As I continue to explore Olaf Sztaba's Blog, I keep finding engaging topics. One of them is how photographers judge their own work and select them for public to see. Note this is the man behind the two digitally published magazines I posted on the other day, the Medium Format Magazine and Elements Photography Magazine. I also find Olaf's photography refreshing that got my attention at an instant.

Olaf in Photography is curation (Part 1) states:

After having in-depth conversations and working with the best photographers in the world, I came to the conclusion that one trace, one common feature among them all is this: they are all great curators! In other words, they have gained the visual proficiency and emotional maturity to curate their own work honestly, thoughtfully and ruthlessly.

In the world of digital shooting, which brings in a lot of recorded images, it is becoming increasingly difficult to pick through and be own toughest critic.

With film there is usually that before-exposure thought, if it is worth doing, sort of a pre-selection.

With digital this is all but gone, as the only measure which may be holding us back is the memory card capacity. I don't mean to suggest everybody shoots digital with the gun out of the holster at all times, whatever shows up in front, then see through it later. At the same time we do continue at an immense, by comparison to film, pace, accumulating large amounts of files, creating the back log of images to examine, often adding time we could spend creating rather then evaluating.

In all this, we now have extremely capable phone cameras that is usually with us, and take a shot of things we would never bother bringing a camera to., further adding to what we need to process later.

Of course this topic applies to any photographs we make, irrespective of how they were taken, with sole difference being shear number of images to ... discard. Or do we?

To me this is about "keepers" and not necessarily all else is being thrown out. I don't really delete files as I continue to find some treasures of old I never knew I had, and certainly don't trash my film, ever. Often enough some not so good takes can be re-interpreted, edited in another way, and suddenly they meet the aesthetician in us.

This also goes into what Olaf is referring to directly: how, who we consider great photographers, select own work for display.

HCB had a history of taking thousands upon thousands of images, and selecting relatively few to show for it. It's how the "decisive moment" myth came to be. Clever way of creating an aura of perfection to the unsuspecting, with all the underwhelming evidence being withheld. Same can be said about just about every well known photographer. Few have actually published contact sheets, with final selection marked (and not necessarily one we would agree on), i.e. Jeanloupe Sieff, or Magnum in the revealing Magnum Contact Sheets.

Does everybody care what meets public eye, are we all capable of being fair and honest with own photographic failures? Do we select exclusively to personal standards, or do we consider who is to see it ?

This topic is NOT about thought process before we trip the shutter, this is all about how we look at and approve what we have already taken.
 

Philippe-Georges

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I stopped counting the (B&W-) films I exposed-and-developed for non professional purpose.
I even stopped making contact sheets...
Al a know is that, before trying to somewhat organising the dozens of binders each holding an average of about 100 sheets of film negatives, I became desperate looking at them.
So I decided NOT to take care of the (to-) large amount of binders holding the 35 mm negatives, and only comb through the binders holding the roll film negatives and slowly but systematically printing the images that are catching my eye or trigger memories...
Luckily I am retired now and have some time to spare, but I hope this combing-and-printing will be done before I die...

But there is an other problem: I continue to 'produce' new photos, so the pile is getting larger by the day, damn!

BTW, I am NOT taking in account the rather large archive of my professional work, this takes a room by it selves, and it is rather discouraging to get started that "combing through"...

Just for your information; here in Belgium we have a law managing the the author's rights, dating from 1994, telling that authors (photographers in this case) can't 'sell' the copyright, but only the publication right of their 'product'.
The copyright stays with the autor till 70 years after his dead and is hereditary, mainly to his children, and in Belgium you cannot disinherit your children.
So as a photographer I can only 'lend' the photo to be published in a particularly described case. And I have to keep the camera original in my archive.
As almost all the work I 'produced' was intended for publication...

I never fully understood how to practically manage this with digital files, as these can easily lead a life of their own once 'send out', but that law dates from before the digital area and was never adapted...
 

Ivo Stunga

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About 50 films per year, all slides I love to watch myself and to present to others. Mediocrity and anything below that gets mercilessly weeded out and yesteryear got physically discarded or put in places for people to stumble upon some film - like private belongings exchange cabinets and trash bins. Could be regrettable, but It's done and I move on.
This year I treated myself with Adox storage sleeves and binders, now I can finally stop discarding my film in a plastic box to get rid off, and can easily inspect various reversal experiments physically, not just scans I made before discarding mediocrities. It's a good idea to keep them if possible, may serve various purposes, could be rediscovered as OP said.

The success rate with color for me is about 6 images a 135/36 roll, with BW it's almost double that. After weeding has been done via loupe and/or scanner, I mount my better slides and watch them enlarged 50 times. Not everything I've mounted keeps mounted, if I don't like something and it cannot be corrected by squaring it, then the slide gets discarded in that box immediately. Tomorrow it will be put back into the sleeve where rest of the roll is. Could make a nice visual log of selection process of sorts.
Then I watch some more. Show to people and take that live reaction as another input data. Then I discard some more, tightening the performance. I hate fillers and wasting time on mediocrity, so I find it easy to ditch my lesser work I've put hours upon hours in.

Then my stock of slide mounts will run out, and I will reinspect my slides, kicking some out again to free up some mounts. Mounts are limited, slide storage boxes are somewhat limited to the shelf size. This revisitation reaches back up to 3 years, after that I leave older slides alone.

This way my slide collection grows and keeps changing, keeps getting curated. I try to keep only 100 images a year: number defined by one slide storage box. Currently I'm at box No. 11, meaning that since about 2009 I have just about 1100 slides to show.
A digital shooter's day's worth of images.

It's funny that you mention curation. I've trained myself to it by curating my music playlists, videogame collection, my slides, then some groups on Flickr...
Agree that it's a strong tool to be employed to tighten your performance. Tool that brings only good to the table.
 
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I stopped counting the (B&W-) films I exposed-and-developed for non professional purpose.
I even stopped making contact sheets...
Al a know is that, before trying to somewhat organising the dozens of binders each holding an average of about 100 sheets of film negatives, I became desperate looking at them.
So I decided NOT to take care of the (to-) large amount of binders holding the 35 mm negatives, and only comb through the binders holding the roll film negatives and slowly but systematically printing the images that are catching my eye or trigger memories...
Luckily I am retired now and have some time to spare, but I hope this combing-and-printing will be done before I die...

But there is an other problem: I continue to 'produce' new photos, so the pile is getting larger by the day, damn!

BTW, I am NOT taking in account the rather large archive of my professional work, this takes a room by it selves, and it is rather discouraging to get started that "combing through"...

Just for your information; here in Belgium we have a law managing the the author's rights, dating from 1994, telling that authors (photographers in this case) can't 'sell' the copyright, but only the publication right of their 'product'.
The copyright stays with the autor till 70 years after his dead and is hereditary, mainly to his children, and in Belgium you cannot disinherit your children.
So as a photographer I can only 'lend' the photo to be published in a particularly described case. And I have to keep the camera original in my archive.
As almost all the work I 'produced' was intended for publication...


I never fully understood how to practically manage this with digital files, as these can easily lead a life of their own once 'send out', but that law dates from before the digital area and was never adapted...

Well, you can always burn the originals. That will show them. :smile:
 

Philippe-Georges

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Why would I burn the originals? There went a lot of blood, sweat and tears in...
Soon or later, perhaps, they can be useful.
And, due to environmental regulations, we are not allowed to burn trash!
 
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Hassasin

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One point of the discussion is file management.

Key question is how critical are we of own work? And how much viewership affects our evaluation process, or does it at all?

In commercial work it is always about what client wants and expects, in non-commercial setting, we are free to pick as we please, except wrong choice may land us in an unappreciated spotlight. Do we care?
 
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Why would I burn the originals? There went a lot of blood, sweat and tears in...
Soon or later, perhaps, they can be useful.
And, due to environmental regulations, we are not allowed to burn trash!

As I approach 80, I find that dragging around my past is tiresome. When I get rid of stuff I don't need to save, it frees up my mind and soul. It's a burden relieved. I feel lighter. Most stuff I thought was so important wasn't.
 

Philippe-Georges

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As I approach 80, I find that dragging around my past is tiresome. When I get rid of stuff I don't need to save, it frees up my mind and soul. It's a burden relieved. I feel lighter. Most stuff I thought was so important wasn't.

I completely consent with that thought, but I am 'only' 66 years old now and have still the time to contemplate on what to do with all that stuff...
 

Andrew O'Neill

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I feel like this topic pops up every now and then. I know it's a keeper if I can live with a print on the wall without complaint (from me) for a year. I made the mistake of purging stuff before I left Japan. I'm sure I dumped some that I may like today, that I hated back then. Eventually though, I will do a full on, final purge of my work (and all the gear I've accumulated over the years!). It will be hard because even with the crappy ones, a memory is attached. I can't take it with me, nor do I want to burden my kids. Of course, I'll keep a few for them. I'm hoping when the time comes, they will pass them on to their kids, and so on. That would be swell.
 
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Hassasin

Hassasin

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As I approach 80, I find that dragging around my past is tiresome. When I get rid of stuff I don't need to save, it frees up my mind and soul. It's a burden relieved. I feel lighter. Most stuff I thought was so important wasn't.

Sure some baggage may well be attached to what we shot long years back.

When my farther grew older and health started suffering, he threw out all of his negatives, without anybody knowing. I nearly didn't make it to the next day when I'd found out. They were not just lost records of great memories, there was high grade work too.
 

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The German photographer Heinrich Hoffman demonstrated a striking example of this. He photographed a crowd of Germans celebrating the outbreak of WWI in 1914. In 1929 Hitler visited Hoffman's studio, and mentioned being at the celebration. Hoffman printed one of his photos that apparently showed Hitler in the huge crowd. This lead to a friendship between Hoffman and Hitler, who near his death married Hoffman's assistant, Eva Braun. Much later people have questioned the integrity of Hoffman's famous photo. Retouching negatives and prints were commonplace long before that time.
 

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On the original subject, I find the opposite to be true. Most photographers are terrible editors of their own work, they are too close to it, sometimes too attached to the emotions or circumstances when the photo was taken. Fine for them, not necessarily relevant to everyone else.

Waiting can be beneficial in editing. Henry Wessel would make work prints and put them away for a year before going back to pick his selects.

When I worked as an art director, I saw a multitude of commercial portfolios. One thing that struck me was that generally, a photographer who was repped had a better portfolio than one who was not. A good rep is able to edit and arrange a portfolio for the specific presentation, something not all photographers can do. I call it "mother hen syndrome" where all their photos are precious and none can be eliminated. One needs to be rather ruthless and take a critical eye to the work, weeding out the week shots. Many photographers want to show a range, from lifestyle to table-top, and if they don't excel at it all it looks bad. Also, when I would see a dubious, sub-par photograph in a photographers portfolio, it would tend to make me think this photographer doesn't know good work from bad work, how can I trust him or her with my job? After all, advertising work pays the higher fees and my job is on the line every time, too.

Lastly, this does not always apply to art or documentary photography. Sometimes a marginal photograph needs to be included to complete the narrative or as part of the flow of images.

If in doubt, hiring a good representative or consultant can be a wise move. Portfolio reviews can also help, although they generally are a bit rushed--only 20 minutes or so.

Lastly, in the film Jay Myself, the photographer Jay Maisel is moving out of a large building in NYC that he had occupied for a long time. Maisel is a bit of a hoarder, collecting bits and pieces that appeal to him to make contraptions and compositions to photograph. He also had what seemed like millions of slides. A favorited scene in the film is slides being swept into piles and stuffed into trash bags as he prepared to move to smaller quarters.
 
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On the original subject, I find the opposite to be true. Most photographers are terrible editors of their own work, they are too close to it, sometimes too attached to the emotions or circumstances when the photo was taken. Fine for them, not necessarily relevant to everyone else.

Waiting can be beneficial in editing. Henry Wessel would make work prints and put them away for a year before going back to pick his selects.

When I worked as an art director, I saw a multitude of commercial portfolios. One thing that struck me was that generally, a photographer who was repped had a better portfolio than one who was not. A good rep is able to edit and arrange a portfolio for the specific presentation, something not all photographers can do. I call it "mother hen syndrome" where all their photos are precious and none can be eliminated. One needs to be rather ruthless and take a critical eye to the work, weeding out the week shots. Many photographers want to show a range, from lifestyle to table-top, and if they don't excel at it all it looks bad. Also, when I would see a dubious, sub-par photograph in a photographers portfolio, it would tend to make me think this photographer doesn't know good work from bad work, how can I trust him or her with my job? After all, advertising work pays the higher fees and my job is on the line every time, too.

Lastly, this does not always apply to art or documentary photography. Sometimes a marginal photograph needs to be included to complete the narrative or as part of the flow of images.

If in doubt, hiring a good representative or consultant can be a wise move. Portfolio reviews can also help, although they generally are a bit rushed--only 20 minutes or so.

Lastly, in the film Jay Myself, the photographer Jay Maisel is moving out of a large building in NYC that he had occupied for a long time. Maisel is a bit of a hoarder, collecting bits and pieces that appeal to him to make contraptions and compositions to photograph. He also had what seemed like millions of slides. A favorited scene in the film is slides being swept into piles and stuffed into trash bags as he prepared to move to smaller quarters.

Jay sold his 1899 NYC building that he lived and worked in for $55 million in 2014. He paid $102,000 for it in 1966. He didn't need to save those slides. :smile:
 
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Hassasin

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Jay sold his 1899 NYC building that he lived and worked in for $55 million in 2014. He paid $102,000 for it in 1966. He didn't need to save those slides. :smile:

I don’t know what those slides had on them, but there are things in life which are small and unassuming, and still priceless.
 

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I had this pile of work, 35-ish years of piling.
Prizes, publications, exhibitions, the usual worthless bullshit.

Decided to stop piling up and I separated color and BW.

Color ended up being separated into 5 themes. Will become 5 books within 2024-2025.

The above represents no less than 1000 hours of developing, scanning, editing, sorting, re-editing… negatives, kodachromes.

Then, the BW will be sorted out, somewhere in 2025. I have at least 7 books sorted in 5 themes in there.
I have printed all my 1993-2010 negs (fb, 11x14, 16x20, 20x24).
I will finish printing 2011-2022 within 2025-2028 I guess.

The above.printing took me 10 years.

So on.
 
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Hassasin

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@Pieter12 You actually bring up an interesting I hadn't thought of before. Most of us can only judge anyone's work / choices on display without really knowing who picked them, photographer, rep, or art director. Credit automatically goes to photographer for an album, but what part he played in making choices for final publication is not all that clear. I'm sure some have great or even final say, many go with the flow, trust editors, and are probably doing better because of that

This also brings to mind some of the albums that to me did great disservice to the photographer. I have not been too impressed with Micheal Kenna for example, but my sole album is not likely to be representative of his life long accomplishments. The problem I had with his work is not quality of separate images, quite impactful majority of them, but when they all get stuffed into a single pub, things get boring quick.

Bruce Barnbaum and his Visual Symphony: major turn off for me. Why? Because one of his canyon shots look great, but when six or something of them go page after page, they look like facsimile of the first. Then the book gets worse, with images that belong in View Camera guide not set up as major aesthetic accomplishment. I have a feeling he was the one who forced the pics as I can't imagine any good enough editor to allow for that to go.

400 Photographs of Ansel Adams did to me a great disservice to his legacy. Not just mediocre quality of printing, but this many photos from his portfolio give a feeling of a lost soul not a great photographer.

On the other hand, I pick any book with Jeanloupe Sieff work, or Saul Leiter among several others, and I'm confident almost everything within is worth seeing.
 

NB23

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@Pieter12 You actually bring up an interesting I hadn't thought of before. Most of us can only judge anyone's work / choices on display without really knowing who picked them, photographer, rep, or art director. Credit automatically goes to photographer for an album, but what part he played in making choices for final publication is not all that clear. I'm sure some have great or even final say, many go with the flow, trust editors, and are probably doing better because of that

This also brings to mind some of the albums that to me did great disservice to the photographer. I have not been too impressed with Micheal Kenna for example, but my sole album is not likely to be representative of his life long accomplishments. The problem I had with his work is not quality of separate images, quite impactful majority of them, but when they all get stuffed into a single pub, things get boring quick.

Bruce Barnbaum and his Visual Symphony: major turn off for me. Why? Because one of his canyon shots look great, but when six or something of them go page after page, they look like facsimile of the first. Then the book gets worse, with images that belong in View Camera guide not set up as major aesthetic accomplishment. I have a feeling he was the one who forced the pics as I can't imagine any good enough editor to allow for that to go.

400 Photographs of Ansel Adams did to me a great disservice to his legacy. Not just mediocre quality of printing, but this many photos from his portfolio give a feeling of a lost soul not a great photographer.

On the other hand, I pick any book with Jeanloupe Sieff work, or Saul Leiter among several others, and I'm confident almost everything within is worth seeing.

The market is not as idealistic as you seem to think. The whole editor deciding thing is not so true, in this world where the photographer/musician/painter is actually paying out of his own pocket.

And it’s all a perceptual game. Anyone into LF will totally comprehend Ansel Adams photos and his Genius.

For those people, Saul Leiter is merely an amateur snapshooter, and very sloppy. Indeed,
The majority of his work is sloppy stuff which became famous in his later years. He was totally overlooked and snubbed until the moment someone in his community decided to push the Saul Leiter thing.
I do agree that his work strikes the poetic and the nostalgic viewer, but for a long time he was burried by many better photographers that somehow tave became forgotten in the mean time. Ernst Haas for example. It’s simply all a question of marketing and what’s available on the mainstream market at the present moment.

All a thing of perception. Basically, who’s into Saul Leiter is not into Ansel Adams, and vice versa.

The indy scene is very interesting and it’s an eye opener for how the market actually works.
 
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@Pieter12 You actually bring up an interesting I hadn't thought of before. Most of us can only judge anyone's work / choices on display without really knowing who picked them, photographer, rep, or art director. Credit automatically goes to photographer for an album, but what part he played in making choices for final publication is not all that clear. I'm sure some have great or even final say, many go with the flow, trust editors, and are probably doing better because of that

This also brings to mind some of the albums that to me did great disservice to the photographer. I have not been too impressed with Micheal Kenna for example, but my sole album is not likely to be representative of his life long accomplishments. The problem I had with his work is not quality of separate images, quite impactful majority of them, but when they all get stuffed into a single pub, things get boring quick.

Bruce Barnbaum and his Visual Symphony: major turn off for me. Why? Because one of his canyon shots look great, but when six or something of them go page after page, they look like facsimile of the first. Then the book gets worse, with images that belong in View Camera guide not set up as major aesthetic accomplishment. I have a feeling he was the one who forced the pics as I can't imagine any good enough editor to allow for that to go.

400 Photographs of Ansel Adams did to me a great disservice to his legacy. Not just mediocre quality of printing, but this many photos from his portfolio give a feeling of a lost soul not a great photographer.

On the other hand, I pick any book with Jeanloupe Sieff work, or Saul Leiter among several others, and I'm confident almost everything within is worth seeing.

Photographers tend to treat their photos like their children. It doesn't work though in a book, portfolio, or slide show. When I first started making slide shows of stills on video, I started at 6 seconds each. Too long. I'm now down to 3 seconds. Plus, I try to eliminate a lot of shots and get the whole show down to 10-20 minutes. It's hard to do. I don't like throwing my children away.
 

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Photographers tend to treat their photos like their children. It doesn't work though in a book, portfolio, or slide show. When I first started making slide shows of stills on video, I started at 6 seconds each. Too long. I'm now down to 3 seconds. Plus, I try to eliminate a lot of shots and get the whole show down to 10-20 minutes. It's hard to do. I don't like throwing my children away.

It’s a mad world. Look at all the reels out there. Instagram, youtube. It created a whole new ADHD society.

Your slideshow needs to be 1 minute, and each slide needs to last 0.2 seconds.

Trust me on that.
 
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Hassasin

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Photographers tend to treat their photos like their children. It doesn't work though in a book, portfolio, or slide show. When I first started making slide shows of stills on video, I started at 6 seconds each. Too long. I'm now down to 3 seconds. Plus, I try to eliminate a lot of shots and get the whole show down to 10-20 minutes. It's hard to do. I don't like throwing my children away.

In the end this is about selection, not how long it takes or how. many images are left as approved. And that "approved" could mean different things, is it just to please photographer, please the exhibit director, please the public, all of it or none?

Olaf was alluding in his posts (here is link to second of his posts on same topic) when a portfolio comes out are all photos of expected high quality, or some appear like a mismatch, not worthy of the rest. Olaf himself, IMO, is quite good curating his own photographs (linked post shows only his work), but I agree that to be great (or even good) one needs to be capable of honest self-critique. And that is often not the case. Work of well know personas get a lot of slack I must say.

Dog's poop shot by Andy Warhol is indeed going to make it to an exhibit, Joe Doe does same thing and he may end up being arrested for a public offence.

Forget subjectiveness of art critique, there's a rampant double standard in the art world. How do you cater to this conundrum?

I alluded earlier to Michael Kenna and the sole album I have of his work, that left me unimpressed. In one of the early issues, October 2020, of Medium Format Magazine, there is interview with Kenna with several photographs from his long portfolio. Had I seen that instead of the book, I'd be more than impressed. Curation worked in this case. WHo was responsible for it I would not know?

And here is another really good article on this ongoing topic, Becoming Your Own Best Editor, from Olaf's blog but written by IBARIONEX PERELLO
 

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"Dog's poop shot by Andy Warhol is indeed going to make it to an exhibit, Joe Doe does same thing and he may end up being arrested for a public offence."

You could be very correct about that!

I'm reminded of a professional society meeting I attended many years ago where the guest speaker was a special effect producer for Star Trek. He talked about all sorts of technical stuff like why the Starship Enterprise banked when it turned and why it flew in a nose-forward direction yet still had artificial gravity. He even talked about funny personality and distinctive behavioral patterns of Captains Kirk and Picard, and why they were significant to the story line (that I had a hard time believing, though). Then he recalled how he created the effect fo some planet or another. He told us that he stepped into dog poop as he walkled to his car, stopped to think about the situation, photographed it, and used that as the basis for the planet. Some people can be successful photographing poop and most of us probably not so much. :smile:
 

Pieter12

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I have not been too impressed with Micheal Kenna for example, but my sole album is not likely to be representative of his life long accomplishments.
I would suggest you pick up a copy of his latest monograph, Photographs & Stories. It represents images from different locations and years over his career so far, and the back of the book has stories about the photos.
 
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Hassasin

Hassasin

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The market is not as idealistic as you seem to think. The whole editor deciding thing is not so true, in this world where the photographer/musician/painter is actually paying out of his own pocket.

And it’s all a perceptual game. Anyone into LF will totally comprehend Ansel Adams photos and his Genius.

For those people, Saul Leiter is merely an amateur snapshooter, and very sloppy. Indeed,
The majority of his work is sloppy stuff which became famous in his later years. He was totally overlooked and snubbed until the moment someone in his community decided to push the Saul Leiter thing.
I do agree that his work strikes the poetic and the nostalgic viewer, but for a long time he was burried by many better photographers that somehow tave became forgotten in the mean time. Ernst Haas for example. It’s simply all a question of marketing and what’s available on the mainstream market at the present moment.

All a thing of perception. Basically, who’s into Saul Leiter is not into Ansel Adams, and vice versa.

The indy scene is very interesting and it’s an eye opener for how the market actually works.
Well, I'm not going to glorify Ansel Adams or argue over quality of Leiter's and similar others work. One needs to see through it to understand their genius.

Where did you get "idealistic" art market from my posts I'll never know. There are sets of works by individuals that all look enticing to engage with, and there are others that come though as rather chaotic, uneven, more like got lucky here, not so much over there. What leads to that end result has to do with how they get put together.

But it is about perception with all the subjectiveness it comes with.

For you AA may have been a genius, but if you honestly go through the mentioned 400 Photographs I seriously doubt you will stay that course (and that if you can get past inept quality of print), his genius diminishes with every 50 photographs. Of course that is how I see it, but as I always appreciated his work, without placing him with all the other saints, I feel very strongly about how his legacy has been, perhaps unjustly, badly hit by that one publication.

And of course I could not disagree more with: if one likes Adams, there is no way he can also like Leiter.
 
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Hassasin

Hassasin

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I would suggest you pick up a copy of his latest monograph, Photographs & Stories. It represents images from different locations and years over his career so far, and the back of the book has stories about the photos.
That is the one I am looking at. The interview from MFM got me interested in him anyways, there was enough evidence, in those 6 or something photos, for me to appreciate his approach to making every image.
 

VinceInMT

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I have a pretty good and efficient filing system for both film and digital and I do keep EVERYTHING. That it is all either in my darkroom or on several hard rives backed up the in the cloud means it is not cumbersome in terms of the rest of my life.

Since I do have all those old images, thousands I have never printed, it has allowed me to stroll through them years later and extract all or portions of them to use in various ways such as abstract content for collages that I do in cyanotype.
 
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