The Daily Blog #70

Print Your Work

At first, I never felt a need to print. The first camera that I owned was digital, and my photos were always on a screen. I didn’t think that I was missing out on anything. For the first several years, I never printed any of my own photos.

Eventually, I started to feel disconnected from the process of photography and I needed something more tangible. I started shooting film. 35mm, instant, medium format… whatever I could get my hands on. Shooting film cleared my head and changed the way I look at photography and made me realize a lot about why I loved photographs.

Although, I still felt disconnected from my digital files. It felt like I had to capture, edit, process, export, save, and back-up photos, just to have them sit on a hard drive. I realized I needed to see my photos some place in the world, in real life. Making prints was obviously what I needed to do.

Now, I had to carefully choose the photos that I wanted to see printed, not just the photos that I liked. I had to choose images that I somehow felt connected to, while gradually weeding out the weakest images. Prints on archival paper become artifacts of a time and place, each representing a series of decisions made before even pressing the shutter. Those decisions are what make up the act of photography for me. I was deciding what I thought should come out of the digital realm and into the physical.

When the prints were finally made, I could stand back and look at a series of photos all at once, change the order, and look for the patterns in the photos. I realized that once they existed in the world, it became easier to see myself in my photos.