There is a folder on my hard drive that I have never shown anyone. It is called, plainly, the bin. Inside it are several hundred photographs that did not, in the end, become anything. Some are nearly good. Many are beyond embarrassing. A few are pictures I was, for a season, quite sure of.
They have all ended up in the same place.
This week I want to talk about that folder. About why I think it might be the most useful place on my hard drive, even though nothing in it ever gets used. And about why the discipline of putting work into it is, for me, the single biggest thing that separates the pictures I am proud of from the much larger pile I am not.
This is, in other words, a post about editing. Which is a word I think we should use more often, and a practice I think we should be much less afraid of.
The word that gets in the way
But first, let me say something about the word failure, because I have come around to thinking it does more damage in studios than almost any other word in our creative vocabulary.
The trouble with failure is that it carries a verdict. It is the language of exams and final judgements. It is a word of bad parents. It closes the door. The trouble for us is that the door is almost never actually closed. The picture that did not work this month is, very often, the picture that teaches us how to make next month’s picture work. To call it a failure is to put a full stop where the work, at most, wants a comma.
So I have replaced the word in my own studio. It has gone into a ‘studio swear jar’. The pictures I would once have called failures are, instead, unfinished. Or they are teachers. Or, most honestly, they are the work that did not yet know what it wanted to be. The artist who can say that to themselves, without flinching, is the artist who can keep going. The artist who keeps using failure about their own work is the artist who, sooner or later, stops.
I am suspicious, by the way, of anyone who tells me their pictures never fail. They are either lying, or they are not pushing hard enough. The two often go together.
Three folders
Here is the practical bit, the bit this all hinges on.
I keep three folders on my hard drive. They are real, named, and the act of moving a picture from one to another is a small ceremony I take seriously. (I have a little imaginary fanfare that plays in my head each time we enact it). The folders are called keepers, teachers and bin. (I also have a little note on my studio wall to remind me of this principle).
The keepers are the small number of pictures that survive the ‘long looking’. They go on the wall, into the small book, into the talk. There are fewer of them than you would think. Far fewer than I would like, really, but’s that’s life. A good year might give me fifteen. Most years maybe twelve. The number is not the point. The fact that they have earned their place is.
The teachers are the pictures that did not make it onto the wall but that I cannot quite throw away because they have something to tell me. They might be nearly there. They might have given me an idea I have not yet finished pursuing. The teachers folder is private. I do not show it. Every few months I revisit it and ask: is this still teaching me something, or is it now ready to go to the bin? Many of them, in time, are.
The bin, finally, is for the work that has done its job. Not failures, in the old sense, but work that has finished what it had to say to me. The pictures in the bin are not destroyed. I am not that kind of artist. They are simply withdrawn from circulation. They are no longer asking anything of me, and I am no longer asking anything of them. We have parted on friendly terms.
If you take only one thing from this post, let it be this: make the three folders. Today. Name them clearly. The act of naming is the start of the discipline. You might even play a little fanfare.
Why we resist
I’ll be honest about something, because I think it is the thing few artists quite says out loud.
Editing is hard not because we cannot see what is weak in our own work. Most of the time, we can. We know which picture is just keeping its friends company. We know which picture is being kept because of the morning that produced it, rather than the picture itself. We know. (we DO know, don’t we, deep down).
Editing is hard because the act of cutting a picture is the act of putting ourselves on the line. The picture we keep is the picture we are now claiming. The argument for it is ours. The responsibility for it is ours. The failure of it, if it fails, is ours.
Hoarding has no edge. As long as everything is kept, nothing has been chosen. As long as nothing has been chosen, nothing can be wrong. Hoarding feels safer. It is not. It is the place where bodies of work go to die quietly under their own weight.
The day you start editing honestly is the day you start being accountable to your own eye. That is uncomfortable. It is also what the practice is for.
The four temptations
There are, in my experience, four temptations that keep weak work alive in our archives long after they should have been let go. Naming them helps.
The first is the picture that took effort. The early start. The long drive. The cold hands, the rain in the lens. These pictures earn an emotional surcharge in our eye that has nothing to do with how strong they actually are. We keep them because of what they cost. The viewer does not care what they cost. The viewer cares whether the picture works.
The second is the picture that nearly worked. This is the most dangerous of the four. The picture that, with another layer, or a slightly different crop, or a small intervention in Lightroom or Photoshop, might be the one. Nearly is not a finished position. It is a state of suspension, and suspended pictures sit in the teachers folder for years, eating attention. The discipline is to take the nearly-pictures, learn what they have to teach, and let them go. The next picture, made on the back of that learning, is usually the one that resolves. Not the nearly itself.
The third is the picture someone else liked. A friend stopped at it. A workshop tutor mentioned it. Someone on Instagram said something kind. The picture has been blessed externally, and it now sits in your archive with a small halo it did not earn. The body of work cannot be edited by other people’s votes. It can only be edited by your own clear eye, applied without an audience in the room.
The fourth is the picture from the rare opportunity. The trip you will not make again. The light that lasted six minutes. The conditions made the picture feel important. They do not make the picture good. Keep the memory. Let the picture go if the picture is not strong. The work owes nothing to the trip. The trip was for you.
I am still keeping pictures, I am quite sure, (ok, ok, I KNOW I am) that one or another of these temptations has been quietly preserving. The work is never finished. The discipline is simply that the questions keep being asked.
Wait before you edit
There is one principle I have come, over many years, to trust more than any other.
Never edit a session on the day you shot it. Never edit a project in the month you finished it.
New work is too warm to handle with any kind of clear head or shrewd eye. The picture you made yesterday is still glowing with the morning that produced it. You will see the morning, not the picture.
So wait. Two weeks for a session. Three months for a project. A year, if you can bear it, for a long body of work. When you come back, the weather of the making has lifted off the work. What is left is what is actually there.
The waiting is not procrastination. While the work is cooling, you do other things. You look at other artists. You make new pictures that have nothing to do with the project resting in the drawer. You read. You walk. The rest is what allows you to come back as someone slightly different from the person who made the work. That is the point. You are not the same photographer three months later. The one who returns to the work is the one who can edit it. The one who made it cannot.
The pictures I edited too quickly, in the heat of having just shot them, are the ones I most often had to re-edit a year later and was embarrassed by. The ones I quietly took down from my website (and still occasionally do when I fail to heed my own lessons). The pictures I let cool are the ones I have rarely had to revisit. Patience is not a virtue here. It is a method.
Three passes, days apart
When the cooling is done, the editing happens in three passes. On different days. I have tried doing all three in a single sitting and it does not work. The eye tires. The judgement softens. By the end you are keeping things because the morning is over.
Pass one is the body pass. Move quickly. Do not think. Look at every picture for two or three seconds and star the ones that pull the eye, without explanation. The body knows what it likes. The mind will get its turn later. This pass should feel almost thrilling. There is a permission in it.
Pass two is the eye pass. A week later. Lay the starred pictures out as small thumbnails. Look for the family. Which pictures belong to which? Which ones are the central figures? Which ones, on closer look, do not belong in the project at all and want to go somewhere else? This is the pass in which the body of work begins to declare itself.
Pass three is the cruel pass. A month later, if you can stand the wait. Half of what survived pass two will now look thin. Cut it. The picture has had its month to argue with you, and it has not won.
The body of work that survives the third pass is almost always smaller than you thought it would be. It is almost always better than you thought it would be. The two facts are related.
Print them small
A practical note that I think matters more than people realise.
Edit on small prints. A5 at most. A6 if you can. Cheap paper, cheap ink, no fuss. Pin them to a board and live with them for a week.
The small print is honest in a way the large print is not. It has nowhere to hide. It cannot dazzle you with scale or detail. It either holds together as a picture, or it falls apart. The pictures that hold together at A6 will hold together at any size you eventually print them. The pictures that need to be big to convince you are pictures that are using size to cover for something missing.
I have a board in the studio that is rarely empty. Whatever project is being edited goes up on it. The prints stay for a week. I walk past them in the morning on the way to the kettle. I look at them in the evening when the light has changed. The pictures that survive a week on the board are the pictures that have something in them. The pictures that begin to embarrass me by Wednesday come down on Thursday.
I know this is less convenient than scrolling through thumbnails on a screen. That is part of the point. The friction is doing useful work. The screen is too forgiving. It is too ‘spangly’. The screen flatters far more than it ought. The wall is impartial.
The seven questions
When I stand in front of the board, these are the questions I find myself asking, in roughly this order.
- Would I miss this picture if it were gone?
- Does it earn its place, or is it just keeping a friend company?
- Am I keeping it for the photograph, or for the memory of the day?
- Would I show this in a small book, beside the others I am sure of?
- Does it say something the others already say, only less well?
- If a stranger saw it cold, would they pause?
- Is it true, or is it merely clever?
The seventh question is the one I find I am still asking, twenty years or more into this. Cleverness is the most common cause of survival in an archive that is otherwise honest. A clever picture is one that has been admired, including by oneself, for its trick. The trick wears off. What is left, if anything is left, is what one truly wants to look at.
Edit toward what you truly want to look at. Cut the cleverness. The body of work will thank you for it.
What false starts are for
I want to tell a short, particular story before I finish, because I think it is the most useful thing I can tell you about this whole subject.
A few winters ago I spent the best part of three months trying to make a project about the coast of North Norfolk, a place I love. I had the idea on a still November afternoon, walking back along a shingle beach in a low light, and I thought: there is a body of work here. I will photograph the beaches and salt marshes through the winter. By spring I will have a project.
The project did not work. I went out three times a week, in all weathers, as we stayed in a cottage there. I made hundreds of frames. Probably thousands. I tried ICM. I tried multiple exposure. By February I knew the project had failed. The pictures were dutiful. They photographed the salt marshes and big skies of Norfolk the way a stranger would photograph them. I had known it long before I had admitted it.
But here is what took me longer to see. Buried inside that winter’s work, when I finally came to look at it honestly, was a folder of frames I had taken almost as off-cuts. The surface of the water under wind. The way the light moved when I was not paying attention. A detritus around a fisherman’s hut. The small disobedience of a pool that refused to sit still for the camera. Eighteen months later, those off-cuts became a body of work I still believe in.
The subject I thought I was photographing was a landscape. The subject I was actually photographing was movement, and refusal, and the small quarrel between light and water. That was the project. The marshes were the place where the project lived. And the false start was how I found it.
This has happened to me more than once. The project you set out to make is, very often, the wrong shape. But buried inside the wrong shape, almost always, is the right one. The discipline is not to make the right project first time. The discipline is to go through with the wrong one with enough seriousness that the right one has a chance to emerge from inside it.
So when you start a project that does not seem to be coming together, before you write it off, look at the edges. Look at the corners of the frames. Look at the pictures you keep coming back to that do not quite fit the brief in your head. The next project is almost always hiding there. Not in the centre. At the edges, where you were not paying attention. Where your eye was paying attention without you.
A studio practice for the week ahead
Here is something you can take into your studio tomorrow.
Make the three folders. Today, before anything else. Name them. Move three pictures into each of them, just to break the seal.
Choose one body of work you thought was finished. A project you have not looked at for at least three months. Sit it down again. Lay it out as small thumbnails. Print a few small, on cheap paper. Pin them to a board.
Run the three passes, days apart. Body, eye, cruel. Star, sort, cut. Be honest. Be slow. Do not edit on a bright morning if you can help it.
Print the survivors small. Live with them for a week. Walk past them. Look at them when you are tired.
And keep a small notebook beside the work. Three sentences after each pass. What did I cut, and why? What did I almost cut, and why did I save it? What am I afraid to cut? The third question is the most important. The pictures we are afraid to cut are very often the pictures that most need cutting. The fear is a signal. Listen for it.
And one last thing
The pictures in the bin are not lost. They live on inside the pictures on the wall, in the form of the rigour that made the wall possible. Every frame that did not make it has helped the frames that did. Nothing is wasted. The body of work you can stand behind is built from the small ruthlessness of all the times you let something go.
This is the part I would most like you to take with you. The bin is not the opposite of the body of work. The bin is part of how the body of work is made. The false start is not a failure. It is the route by which the real work arrives.
Be kind to the bin. Be honest with the teachers. Be ruthless, but not cruel, with the keepers.
And the next time you sit down to edit, wait for a grey morning. Make a pot of tea. Have a plate of your favourite biscuits. Take the work that is in the way of the work, and let it go.
The picture you most want to be making is on the other side of that cut.
