Back in May of 2024 I read an article that suggested photographers could benefit from looking at their old photos as if they were made by a different person. At the time, I was skeptical about the idea, but what the hell…I did it anyway. And here’s me doing it again, for the 9th time.
What’s weird is the fact that I’ve never been at all interested in looking at my old photos. I understand a lot of photographers do that, but it never made much sense to me. I mean, I shot those photos; I know what they look like. I’ve already seen them; I want to see something new.
Without rereading the original post (or the original article), I can’t quite recall the actual point of this exercise. I think the idea was that by looking at one of your old photos as if some other photographer had shot it, you can learn more about yourself as a photographer. That doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with dissociating yourself from your work and evaluating it. Whatever the point was, it was apparently enough for me to go rummaging through my digital archives.
Which brings me to this:
I shot this about two months after buying my first digital camera–an Olympus C770UZ. We’re talking four megapixels. I’d put away my Canon A1 a couple years earlier, bored with photography (most of the photos I’d shot in the preceding years were job-related: forensic photos of crime scenes or surveillance photos). A friend had bought one of those Olympus cameras and it looked like fun. So I bought one and started playing with it.
This photo was shot at night, a 15 second exposure, illuminated with a flashlight. It’s just one of my old arson boots, jammed full of dead grass I’d gathered during the day, and set on top of a clay flowerpot. No idea why; I must have been in a Dadaist mood. I even gave the photo a title: Vase.
You know, I’m starting to understand some of the value of looking at old photos. I was a lot more playful with photography back then. I think having a digital camera–being liberated from the expense and constraints of film–gave me more freedom to just try weird shit and immediately get a sense of whether that weird shit worked. I recall getting several friends to simultaneously throw objects into the air, which I’d then photograph. Things like footwear or toys or pieces of fruit, hovering in the air.
Now I think of it, my first foray into Instagram was a project I called Things on a Table, which had a somewhat Dadaist anti-art nonsensical vibe, and was also sparked by the purchase of new tech; in this case, a cellphone with a decent camera. Since it wasn’t a ‘real’ camera and Instagram wasn’t a ‘serious’ photo app, I could just fiddle around with them. The project involved finding a thing, putting that thing on a glass-topped patio table, then photographing the thing. I wrote about Things on a Table back in 2014.
I may have to consider doing some sort of Dadaist project. Preferably one that doesn’t require buying new tech.
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