Kill your darlings

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. – Arthur Qiller Couch “On the art of writing”

My workshop at the Griffin Museum of Photography is about to end. As part of the workshop requirement, three of my images will be exhibited alongside with other six other workshop participants’ work at a group exhibition. Here lies another challenge: curating three images that show my skills of making images that are both visually impactful and give clues to who I am as a photographer.

I talked about the importance of printing with previous blog entries. After years of photographing, I have found the most difficult skill to master is self-editing. I find printing my work is a critical step in this process. When you print you learn some of the painful steps of self-editing. Which image is worth printing? Images that look great being displayed on the monitor, may not garner the same visual impact when printed. While capturing the image, I may have ignored some crucial details that needed attention, those will be shown on my prints. How can I make my images stronger through post-processing? What is the story I am telling by choosing a specific group of images being displayed together? Is there some connecting thread, if not, can I establish one, thus giving seemingly unrelated images a visual cohesion? What is the context I am going to present those photographs? What relationship do they have with each other? What order should they be in? Those are all important considerations, and the decisions are detrimental as to how one’s images are being perceived in a public setting.

Now come the agonizing part of any multiple image project. What to cull? For the last two weeks I have been doing test prints on potential candidates for the exhibition and have been shuffling them around. Does this image belong? Which images have the potential to strengthen the story line and not becoming distractions? Should I add this image just because it's a good image? How do I sequence those images? Editing is a heartbreaking process. We must be honest with ourselves if we are to put our best foot forward. As I sift through my images, I notice not all the prospective images make for strong candidates being displayed in a gallery setting. Some of the images I pick lack the visual logic I conceive when being put in a group. Obviously, I don’t wish to have weak links in any of the images I decided to put in the exhibition. It is easy to become emotionally invested in certain images. I may love an image because I have all sorts of emotional attachment to it, but the emotional content cannot always be accessed by the viewers. First and foremost, photography is a visual medium, the strength of an image can only be appreciated by its strength, and not anything else. I may have put in great effort to make an image, but if it is a weak image, a viewer will only see it as such and have no care as to how much effort I have put into making it.

Another editing challenge I encounter is when I am forced to cut a strong image from the group of images for consideration. An image may be stunning, but if doesn’t have the same look and feel as the other images, it will look out of place and risk throwing off the balance for the rest of the group. I choose my final selection based on not only the merits of each image and seeing them work well together as a group. To me, they are three strong images, each on their own, but when put together, they sing in unison.

It has been a wonderful learning experience going through the whole process by being objective when editing my work, post-processing, printing and finally, framing those images so they will display nicely on the wall at the gallery. I feel a strong sense of pride when I see my finished framed prints come together. I look forward to seeing them being shown to the public. I am grateful for the opportunity to exhibit my work by participating in the workshop.