Never Delete Any Photo

Digital photography gave us something film never had: an instant undo button for our own judgement. See an image on the back of the camera, decide it fails, press delete, and it’s gone. Film made destruction harder; you could bin a print, but the negative sat in its sleeve unless you went out of your way to cut it up. That friction protected work from impulsive decisions. We’ve lost it. My mum at her crafts with a 50s TLR and a badly rinsed film during development I stopped deleting in the field years ago, and the archive built since contains many photographs I initially considered worthless. Some still are. A meaningful number turned out useful, interesting, or occasionally good. The images hadn’t changed; I had. Taste is not stable. I spent years rejecting frames because colour relationships felt off, then moved to black and white and found images I’d nearly discarded reading as compositionally interesting. The colour problem simply disappeared; the structure, which I’d overlooked…