Sorting the Dross from the Fruit.

I had another of those clearing out sessions last night, this time concentrating on the detritus from my photography days. I’d decided after sorting much of it last Friday that most of it should go. I’ve always had a mild hoarder tendency, but I’ve come to feel that now is the time to reverse the trend.

I started with the piles of glossy magazines containing pictures I took when I was a minor sort of nationally-known name (but only to those few hardy individuals who were inclined or had reason to read the picture credits.) And then I turned my attention to other piles of old prints and clippings from articles I wrote, images and words which I once thought had merit, but which have failed the test of revised judgement consequent upon age and the application of more exacting standards. And finally I took out the dust-encrusted files of monochrome negatives which I’ve kept since the pre-commercial period when I was still in thrall to the delusion that I had artistic leanings. (I never was an artist, you know. I was a skilled illustrator, but never an artist. You might have noticed that I could write passable ditties on this blog, but I was never a poet. Oddly, I don’t think I would now welcome being either. Life does indeed move on, perceptions evolve albeit imperceptibly, and perception remains the whole of the life experience.)

They’re all bagged up and ready to go to the tip, but I’ve had a small change of mind. Most of this stuff has no value, but is simply flotsam floating on the wake of a passing phase. But not so the monochrome negatives. They represent – in concrete form – a valued part of a time when life was very much richer, more varied, and more active than it has latterly become. They are the fruits of late nights spent with my beloved dog in a red-lit room, developing countless rolls of film and making prints from selected examples, thrilling to the form and tonality of pictorial achievement, racking them up to dry, and all accompanied by a cassette player singing the mood of the moment quietly in the background. And then to bed.

They were magical hours, and the time to consign their fruit to obscurity is not yet to hand. They can stay bagged up, but the bag will remain with me for what remains of the foreseeable future.