A few days ago, while I am sure I could have been productive . . . I instead made digital dupes of some old negatives. I think most of them are from 1997 or before, but I wasn’t very good about dating my work until we moved to Savannah (1999?). One day I will go through and digitize all of my old work, but that goes at the bottom of a very long list of “one day” items. In case you are wondering about the “breaking my own rules” thing, I haven’t done anything to most of these images and I wouldn’t call them print-ready . . . and I normally have a rule that I don’t show people anything I wouldn’t print and display, but these have a certain nostalgic value to me without them being quality work. Hopefully no one will judge my current photographic skill by the quality of things I shot ten years ago.
The two people shots below are considerably older. Both of them pre-date my move to medium format, which was probably 95 or maybe 96. One of them is on “safety film” which means it was probably taken during a photography class I took where we had to test different film and developer combinations. The European medium-format shots are all from an eight-week backpacking trip in the summer of 97 (the edge fogging is from the length of time I carried the film unprocessed combined with multiple xrays).
I really, really like some of these–notably, the beach photos, and the two portraits. Dare I say there is an age and a heft to them that I enjoy.