This purge feels good. And at the moment, it is only color chromes. And all for stock use. When I shot the film, I would always pull my faves and put them in a sheet marked selects. I would then give all the film to my editor, maybe 8 to 10 sleeved pages with my selects on top. My editor would pull his picks to digitize and return everything else to me. When he returned his selects, they went into a separate binder with the Getty reference number attached. I am keeping my selects, and the Getty selects. This a long winded explanation of saying I am tossing the outtakes. The bad exposures, the missed expressions, the out of focus, etc. Not sure why I really kept them all these years, they take up a lot of room, but it seemed important to hang on to them for some reason. But not anymore. The purge is feeling good. Now the black and white stuff is a different story. Unlike the chromes, they are not finished and not easy to separate the selects from the outtake on the same roll. I will probably look over them more carefully and choose the ones I wish to digitize. Getty digitized a few, but from toned prints I made back then. So they not necessarily as good as if I scanned the neg. I also noticed I did my best work in the beginning and five years into shooting for stock I was making the same images, only with different faces. The one parent I heard from today said he was happy with the collection I gave him 20 years ago and had no interest in having the original film. So it’s gone. As far as UW goes, they would have no interest in my stock work, the Director of Special Collections even stupidly said as much. They will be appreciative when they get my early stock work and see it’s artistic value and how it set the trend for photo work of that era. They will be much happier with finished prints and portfolios and a succinct collection of my film. So at the moment I am not tossing anything precious. It will be tricky when I go to evaluate my personal works. Even the outtakes are precious still. It’s a process, because if I don’t decide where this works goes, someone else, perhaps with a less discerning eye will.
