Every week, first time
This is the first time I have made a series of images from older images. All images were taken in 2019. For each week of the year, I selected an image from the archive. I did not regard the selection of images as some kind of project. It was just a personal reflection on situations in which I had made an image. This is the everyday gamble of living a life with a camera at hand. Of course, there is a small story behind each photograph: the missed bus, the hot summer, the first hospital stay, and so on. However, looking at the images now with some distance brings up one question in my mind: how do we understand the meaning of photographs?
When doing a project, I usually ask myself if the project is author-based or story-based. Even if this collection of photos is not a real project at all, it can be regarded as an author-based collection as it has no concrete story in mind. I am aware that the audience for such collections is very small. However, the joy of selecting and sequencing my own images is a reflective and honest way of remembering and appreciating moments in my life during the last year. It is the result of my passion to observe and to document.
In fact, for many years, I did not present images to anyone. I simply regarded them as too personal. Like most photographers, I have many photos in my archive that no one has ever seen. Presenting them did not feel right for me, and I simply could not imagine any reason to do so. Looking at my image archive now, I sometimes evaluate and understand images in a different way. I remember an afternoon last summer when many kids were playing in our garden. In one moment, I just saw the legs of a child appearing under a clothesline. I took the image since I liked the scene and the light. Months later, the girl told me about her problems and insecureness in school. From that moment on, I could not see only legs below the clothesline.
Working with older images in the digital era is a compromise. Printed photographs are beautiful to touch and arrange; they get used, and they become signs of age. You need to decide where to store them. They might get lost, forgotten, recovered or just remembered. In this way, they are unique objects, and I tend to contribute more value to them than to digital images. However, their digital counterparts are more convenient to manage. They can be presented to others by a single click, which increases the audience and facilitates interaction (with all it's negative side effects). A printed photograph of the girl’s legs would mean even more to me. To make a long story short, for those reasons, I decided to print the images and digitize them later for publication.
Here starts one of the contradictions between making a photo and presenting it. Even if making a photograph is always a more or less personal process, the presentation transforms it from something private and personal to something public. It still can preserve a personal meaning for the photographer; however, the image itself, the idea, intention and story are now open for evaluation and interpretation (and those concepts often cannot be derived from an image in a direct way). Choosing images from an archive is one thing; sequencing images is another, and both are rather personal and subjective decisions. Dealing with a series of images makes the idea, intention and story even more complex. Arranging and sequencing the images is a science itself, and I would be very surprised if any deliberate selection of images would deliver the same sequence when done by different photographers or editors.
I have doubts if a single image has a fixed intention or meaning. Sure, each image has been made in some context and the photographer had (in the best case) some reason to make it (even if it has become technically too easy). However, the way we experience our surrounding is highly subjective and is prone to change: locations and time, views and opinions, relations and context. A photograph, with or without any additional information, can touch the viewer‘s mind in very different ways. Beside some kind of curiosity, this is the world of individual perception, experience, knowledge and emotion. In this manner, it has always been a joy for me to look at images from other photographers, to experience something new, to change the point of view, to start an unpredictable journey, and finally, to learn about myself. Hope you enjoy.
