I've been going through a huge pile of negatives. Negatives from every picture I have ever taken. Negatives I have been carrying, adding to, cataloging, and minding for more than twenty years. I am throwing more than 90 percent of them away. And it feels amazingly good.
Photographs are a way of trying to hold onto the past. Several years ago I decided to go on a vacation without a camera, and instead of taking pictures of things, or of me doing things, I would try very hard to remember the experience. To feel it fully and be there, and have it in my head to go back to when I wished, instead of glossing over the events while I was there, and having it on a piece of paper in a book to be forgotten. That trip stays in my mind as one of the most real and gorgeous moments of my life, a time when I was really truly present for the first time ever.
Ever since then I have been throwing away photographs.
It's hard to convince people to put down the camera. Memory is faulty, and you will forget things, and somehow, we have become convinced, as a culture, that forgetting things is bad or a great cultural loss. I have become convinced that forgetting things allows us to see the parts that were really important. We forget the details because the details don't matter. What mattered was that on our wedding day, we were overwhelmingly happy to be around friends and family. What matters is that when we held our puppy for the first time, we felt an overwhelming love for her. It doesn't matter that she was not wearing a collar, or that the sun was very bright, or that Noel was wearing a blue shirt. Those details get in the way of the really important memory.
What has been interesting, in going through all these negatives, is the progression of my photographic style. At the beginning, all the subjects are far away, dead center in the image, usually very little emotion coming through. As the negatives progress, I get closer and closer, get better at framing, get better at waiting to capture a moment. This is especially true of my "sports photographer" phase, when I was on the cross country and track teams but because of my astonishingly bad knees, unable to run in races. I took photos instead.
It took a while, but near the end of the series, I got good enough that the photos actually show the personalities of my teammates, rather than a bunch of distant blurry figures running. Part of that was my switch to using mainly a zoom lens, which allowed me to get closer to my subjects than I could from the sidelines. The other part is that after one season of taking photos and giving them to the subjects, I was able to get closer because my teammates were willing and eager to be photographed. People asked me to photograph them during certain events (I just found a series of photos of one teammate going over hurdles) so they could see their form and have a cool picture of themselves in action.
I'm throwing all these negatives away.
High school wasn't too bad to me. I didn't work as hard as I could have, and got by on my excellent memory, but overall it wasn't so bad. On the other hand, I don't need to hold onto a hundred photographs of people who were only nice to me because I would give them a copy of the photograph, not for decades. They take up room I could use for something else.
There are some negatives I am saving. Pictures of my family when I was a kid (non-crappy ones). Pictures taken on my trip to France, carefully weeded (about half had to go). Pictures from Brazil, also weeded through. Pictures which answer the question, "What was X like, anyway?" Pictures that are intrinsically beautiful, that are artistic of themselves -- and there are remarkably few of these.
So now I have a couple dozen more negative sheets, and room in my life for more photographs, better photographs. Culling through things and getting rid of what is unimportant allows what is important to take the space it deserves.
