A Photograph Living in No Man’s Land

Posted by – February 6, 2010


Los Angeles, Calif. – 2007-2008

As painful as it is, I’m always going through my archives and re-evaluating photographs. The vast majority need to be deleted, but for whatever reason I can’t always do it.  Then there are those few photographs that stare at you without answers.  They don’t fit into any of your schemes.  They are flies, gnats, annoyances.  What to do? as Blake Andrews might ask. I’m not one to allow organisms to live in limbo, so I normally end up re-examining the puzzle.  If the photograph asks a question, then certainly it must fit somewhere.  And sometimes when it does fit, it changes you’re ideas. This is why this particular photograph is causing problems for me.  It exists in a place and time that I can’t easily categorize, which makes it of particular interest to me.  Right now, I’m tossing this outlier with a bunch of other misfits, but I’m not sure it will get along with them.

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  • jaimealvarez
    Todd Hido references them as orphans which I think is a very fitting name. I too go through this problem, particularly now, because I have been restructuring (organizing, cataloging, then digitizing) the majority of my negatives (about 450 neg sheets to date), from daily things that I have photographed since 8 years ago.

    It then leaves me in a place where I can't decide what they about. I can't label it. I can just tell people, its what I find along the way.

    Its like this Robert Adams quote

    "No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film."
  • bformhals
    Thanks Jaime. Great quote. I love Mr. Adams.

    These outliers really bother me because I feel the message they are sending is the strongest. Kind of like a kick in the ass that forces you to look in other directions.

    Troubling, but but worth paying attention to, and I think that's the key...

    Good luck with those negs :)
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