Scanning my way though old work

I have access to all my old negatives for the first time in more than a decade and I am starting to scan my way through the collection. It is a quite a task but part of the what I have in my mind is the idea that I need to ‘catch up with the past’.

What do I mean by that?. This has been a decade which has seen the world of photography turned upside down by digital. Funny how it sounds so old fashioned to even make a statement like that, but that part of my work which preceded the digital revolution seems to me to be lost in a time warp, from which it needs liberating. Scanning and retouching does offer me the possibility to rescue a number of images which had dust or scratches on the negatives, so there are images which I am working with now which have never been printed or shown before

I was an early adopter of ‘digital’ and I have owned high-end scanning equipment and have did extensive digital post production long before the DSLR. But archival photo printing was not a practical reality ten years ago. I had an excellent darkroom at that time and that provided little incentive to scan and enhance digital files.

I am not sorry in the least that the darkroom has been retired. Although there are a few qualities of the silver print which are not readily duplicated with current inkjet printing there were so many limitations to the process that I have no plans ever to produce silver prints again. The EXHIBITIONS ’80-’90 gallery-set on the site contains photos of pretty much all the silver prints – mostly the only ones in existence (thus  single editions). Some of these were featured in a recent show at Hall Winery in Napa Valley.

So what of this new scanning work is on the site thus far? It is all in the DIGITAL SCANS section. I have had no express requirement to choose what to scan first but I have been in a groove scanning 4×5″ negatives and it so happens that my early work was in this format. Later on I shot everything in 8×10″ and later still I shoot digital. So, as it turns out that the work up there comprises ‘early work’.