Every once in a while, Lightroom accuses me of taking a photograph I’m sure I’ve never seen before. A forgotten photograph can look as though it belongs to someone else.
There it is in the catalog. My camera made it, the date proves I was there, and the files surrounding it belong to me, too. There really isn’t much room for an argument. Still, I look at the photograph and think, When did I take this?
Usually a photograph brings at least something back with it. I remember the place, the weather, what I was trying to photograph, or perhaps what happened just before or afterward. Sometimes I can even remember standing in a particular spot and deciding exactly where I wanted the edge of the frame. Then there are these other photographs where I remember nothing at all. It’s almost as if somebody slipped one of their pictures into my files.
Finding a forgotten photograph
My first reaction is usually to solve the mystery. I look at the photographs before and after it, check the date, and search the frame for something familiar. Maybe I recognize a building, a road, or something in the background. Eventually I can usually reconstruct enough of the day to figure out where I was.
Lately, though, I’ve wondered whether I should be so quick to do that.
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The memory behind the image
There is something unusual about looking at one of my own photographs without remembering anything about making it. Normally, I can’t completely separate the photograph from the experience behind it. If I remember walking a long distance to get somewhere, waiting for the light, fighting bad weather, or spending an hour trying to make the composition work, some of that experience follows the photograph home with me.
The effort becomes attached to the image, and so does the memory. That can make it difficult to know exactly what I’m responding to when I look at the photograph later. Do I really like the image, or do I like remembering the afternoon when I made it?
That question becomes much easier when I remember nothing.
Suddenly, the photograph has to stand there by itself. There’s no good story to rescue it, no memory of how hard I worked for it, and no attachment to the place. I’m simply looking at what ended up inside the frame.
In a peculiar way, I get to see my own photograph more like you would see it. You weren’t standing beside me when I took it. You don’t know whether I waited thirty seconds or three hours. There’s no way to tell whether I drove five hundred miles to get there or stepped outside my front door. Unless I tell you, all you have is the photograph.
I don’t get that kind of distance from my own work very often.
Seeing my own work with fresh eyes
Sometimes I find a forgotten photograph and like it immediately. There may be something about it that surprises me because I don’t remember making the decisions that produced it. I can study the composition almost as if another photographer made it. Why did I put that there? Why did I leave so much room around this? Would I make the same decision today?
Other times, of course, I discover exactly why I forgot the photograph.
Some pictures deserve their anonymity.
I can look at one and think, Well, apparently I pressed the shutter. That may be about the nicest thing I can say for it. But even those photographs can be useful because I’m judging them without defending myself. I’m not remembering what I intended, explaining why the conditions were difficult, or giving myself credit for almost getting it right.
I just see what I made.
It makes me wonder how many of us would judge our photographs differently if we could temporarily forget making them. Imagine being able to erase the memory of a photograph for five minutes, look at it fresh, and then get the memory back. I suspect some images we’ve been attached to might suddenly seem fairly ordinary, while others we’ve overlooked might become much more interesting.
We can’t actually do that, of course, but time does some of it for us.
What time leaves behind
The longer I photograph, the more distance develops between me and some of those older files. There are photographs in my archive now where I no longer remember the circumstances surrounding every frame. When I return to them, I sometimes meet an earlier version of myself whose decisions I don’t completely recognize.
I think that may be the part I enjoy most. I’m not simply looking at an old photograph. I’m looking at evidence of how I saw something at another point in my life. That earlier photographer may notice something I’m not sure I would notice today or make a composition I probably wouldn’t make now.
Occasionally I think he was onto something.
Occasionally I’d like to have a word with him.
Either way, the distance is useful. Photography is so closely tied to memory that I hadn’t given much thought to what happens when the memory begins to disappear but the photograph is still sitting there.
What remains is the image itself.
And every once in a while, I think that may be the fairest way I ever get to see one of my own.
More Thoughts
When My Taste Changes Before My Photography Does
https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/when-my-taste-changes-before-my-photography-does/
The People Who Never Say Anything
https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/photography-audience/
When Advice Becomes a Substitute for Seeing
https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/when-photography-advice-gets-in-the-way/
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