Two and a half month I traveled and worked in América Del Sur. Having the opportunity to shoot almost every day I made a fair amount of images, street and documentary photography and some portraits. Images that I am now just starting to look at. And there’s nothing like prints to edit, sequence, select and judge images. So I very loosely selected a handful of images that looked interesting, turned out to be 185 images, about 3-4% of what I had captured. I made small prints of all of these and now I can play with them. Spread them all over the floor of the boat, touch them, shuffle them around, sequence, select them. Prints just speak to me in a way pixels on a screen do not. I can sequence and edit them over and over, creating a new creative result every time. I am wanting to bring the physical process back into my photography and am looking forward to hopefully soon be shooting and processing black-white film myself with a Leica M6.
Looking at these images, do I have a body of work? I do not really know. There are some good images. A few greats. Lots of mediocre ones, good intentions, poor results. Forcing something out of nothing. Do I want to do something with these images? A new book? Books? A much smaller book, say concentrating on stories of Peru? Question everything? Yes. I do not know, that is part of what the prints are for, I can get to know what I have captured and see what (if anything) I want to do with these images. What do they tell me, what do I feel looking at them? Prints, even tiny ones like these, are a very important part of the process.
