The Importance of Editing

As my photographic practice has matured, I’ve come to realize the importance of editing. I’m not talking about editing in terms of postproduction image correction. What I’m talking about instead is the culling of images, the separation of the wheat from the chaff.

What propelled me to take editing more seriously was actually a rather practical concern. My iPad, which is on the older side, serves as my digital photo album. My practice had simply been to sync my entire photo collection onto my device. But with the explosion of the volume of my work in recent years, my 64 GB iPad began to run out of space.

I had taken a lot of photographs that I felt were good enough to save but that didn’t necessarily have a lot of stopping power. Reluctant simply to replace a perfectly functioning device with a new one just to get more storage capacity so that I could continue to be lazy, I decided to take a smarter if not burdensome approach and do a bit of editing.

I spent weeks going through thousands of photographs from beginning to end. Chipping away at the project whenever time and inclination allowed, I eventually judged each image I’ve ever produced on a scale of one to five using nothing more sophisticated than a gut feeling.

What makes a photograph good? Everyone’s answer to that question varies. But at bottom, you know it when you see it.

Now, only photographs that have a rating of four or five get synced to my iPad. And I have to say that browsing my collection of images on that device is far more satisfying than it was before.

Beyond simple concerns over my iPad’s storage space, editing my work brought me other benefits with more meaning. After looking over my work for a while, themes began to emerge.

For one thing, it became clear to me that I have been drifting toward black and white. Color in a photograph is often a distraction, and in the vast majority of cases it serves no compositional purpose. The more time passes, the more I feel that I can express myself better by rendering my subject matter in monochrome.

But what is it that I am trying to express? Sometimes all I am capturing in a photograph is a simple sense of beauty. That in itself is a worthwhile thing to pursue. But other times, aesthetics are not enough, and I want to make a statement.

On this blog here, here, and here, I’ve touched upon one theme: how a deep sense of loneliness characterizes a great deal of modern life. Our technology in general and social media in particular open up possibilities for us to be better connected to each other than we ever have been before. But ironically, the opposite has happened. Personally speaking, I have found it harder and harder to do things the old-fashioned way by meeting people through in-person clubs and organizations. The art of the get-to-know-you, the chemistry of real personal interaction, and the cultivation of friendships are all dying. Whether it’s the result of insecurity, narcissism, or just plain laziness, we have replaced personal contact with “likes” and little one-liners indifferently pecked out on our smartphones and carelessly fired off at each other. At bottom, we have collectively made a Faustian deal: in exchange for all the benefits delivered by platforms that claim to promote connectedness, we have allowed ourselves to become the very product that social media companies sell to their clients.

Loneliness has been one theme I’ve been unconsciously pursuing all this while. In much of my photography, I had been depicting people by themselves or photographing lonely places completely bereft of anyone. This is a theme I want to continue to explore more intentionally.

But all is not doom and gloom. I’ve written before about how the simple act of looking up can reveal new perspectives that make for great photography. I’ve also written here, here, and here about how much fun nighttime street photography is. Through editing my work, various other themes have emerged, too.

With these themes in mind, I’ve been working on refreshing my photography portfolio and making it more meaningful. My intent is to continue exploring the themes I present there and adding new photographs to that collection.

Projects help focus the mind. They channel creative energy in a disciplined way. Unleashed exploration isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But instead of doing nothing other than kick out random photographs of this and that, it helps to have certain goals to strive for. As he wrote in the first volume of his book The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, which I wrote about myself here, John Schaefer speaks about the importance of tailoring one’s work around themes and projects. They are one of the best ways to advance one’s skills as a photographer.