The Work is What You Show Others

Most of my photos are never seen by anyone. Not even my family and friends. I take a fair number of them, though nothing like what I shot twenty years ago, and only a tiny fraction ever makes it out of my computer. A photo per post on Substack, another as a postcard every month, a few in a zine every once in a while, that’s pretty much it. I didn’t grow up in a social media world, I don’t feel that I need to constantly share to exist. The rest lives on hard drives. I edit them, sometimes print them, put them in books, and nobody knows any of it happened. That’s entirely on purpose. Walking in the countryside I don’t call my photographs my work (I’ve said before that I hate the word, but I’ve never found a better one). For me, work means something very specific: it’s what I’ve shared. The photos that crossed from my private world into someone else’s consciousness. Once a photo crosses into the world, it stops being mine to revise. I could reprocess the file because I have new ideas or…