Revisit
I spent the weekend re-editing my portfolio. Redux is the key in this process. You need to throw out anything, which you have the slightest doubt about… that of course, when editing your own work tends to leave you with an empty portfolio… and if it doesn’t… well you’ve got a problem at hand in any case!
After throwing out a lot of stuff - killing three entire sections in fact - and reducing all the remaining galleries to the bare essence, I decided to browse the archives for the off chance of a hidden gem. Any photographer has them… those hidden folders, secured deeply on some external hard drive… just waiting to be rediscovered or dismissed forever. A few minutes into the process I stumbled upon this:
“The Whispering Hedge” is what I called the file years ago. I was happy to see it again as it comes from a very different time of my photographic career… a simpler time… shot “only” with available light. It was taken during my first exhibition which I shared with Jakob Krattiger, a truly gifted painter. We were trying to combine photography with painting in a thematic exhibition. That day we were hanging out at the gallery, waiting for people to come streaming in… they didn’t. So we decided to go take some pictures… it was as simple as that. Years later I look at it and it sparks new ideas. Prehaps these ideas will make it into my coming exhibition…
A few hours later another one pops out of the archives:
“In An Hour Darkly” reads the file name. Perhaps it was a dark hour, perhaps not so much. This one used to be in my portfolio in the very first installment of my website. This is very early stuff from when I first fell in love with cameras. Available light again (I knew nothing of strobes back then!). It was taken inside of a gigantic, modern sculpture made of steel walls in my home town. The actual model I was shooting is the lady out of focus in the back. The girl in front was her companion, making sure no weird business was going on with this strange bearded photogropher… At some point I asked her to come into the shot because she was just standing by, looking terribly bored. This turned out to be the best shot of the set.
Both these shots are back in my official portfolio now. Have a look here, along with some other new stuff!
Perhaps I took them into the new portfolio because they remind me of what photography can also be: As simple as a click in a moment of inspiration. Nothing more, nothing less!
And now it’s time to have a glimpse into your archives! Connect those hard drives and delve into your photographic past. Send in your archived and forgotten gems to contact@nicolashenri.ch and I will show them in an upcoming post! I am more than curious what you have in store for me!
Posted by nicolas_henri on March 22nd, 2009 :: Filed under Photography, Web
Tags :: Archive, Edit, Portfolio, Revisit
