Silly me to have neglected doing anything but filing away negatives and slides for two decades. The scanning will take forever. Keywords and captions eat up hours and hours of precious time.
Then the next problem, what to do with all those archived, keyworded/captioned photos?
I resolved this, sort of, by setting up categories - personal, family, travels, architecture (I was an architect for 20|+ years and have many thousands of images of client work which I need not keep, but I do), colonial buildings (about 40,000), cats (we've lost count). This has at least let me retain my sanity to an extent, even if I've only managed to make a small dent in the pile.
A couple of months of serious thinking brought me to the resolve that much of what I've shot in the last six decades, will stay unscanned unless I have a specific demand or need for an old image. Even so my old photos must still be identified, checked for damage and decay, and keyworded/captioned before returning to their hidey-holes in archival folders and acid-free boxes.
A dozen camera kits will have to go, later this year when the sale market improves in Australia - but that's another story, maybe worth a future post.
All this has caused a degree of angst, and I found affected my photography, to the extent that I no longer carry a camera with me on my daily exercise walks. Street shooting in an Australian country town isn't especially satisfying. Interesting subjects are few and far between and many bush Aussies don't take kindly to having a 70-something stranger push a camera into their faces even in public. Doing portraits of flowers and trees and white cockatoos in our local parks holds no appeal for me, so that avenue is definitely out.
I live in the hope that Covid lockdowns and travel restrictions in Asian countries and here in Oz will loosen up in the not-too-distant future so I can go Asian nomad wandering, tho' this now looks like I had best not pin my hopes too high until the end of this year.
I'm reading old photography books and acquiring new ones here and there as I go - my latest prize is 'On Photographing People and Communities' by Daoud Bey, an Aperture book found in, of all places, a discounted new bookshop in Melbourne just before the latest stage 4 lockdown clicked into place. It wasn't cheap, but it has opened my eyes to new potential in people photography, an area I'd not really devoted much time to in my quest to record old colonial buildings and other period architecture before the property developers' bulldozers turn up, which is happening everywhere now.
It's entirely possible, I think, that we photographers can be neatly categorized (I hesitate to say 'pigeon-holed') into two specific sociological categories, under-70s and over-70s. The first lot look forward to greater things in their imagery, while the other lot are seeking for more ultimate (and in my case, minimalist) outcomes.
As always, your thoughts on all this will be appeciated.
