The art of editing… and the challenging last mile

Magnum photographer David Hurn says in the book “On Being a Photographer: “… the best editors/selectors of images are those who are capable of divorcing themselves from emotion when judging their own (or others’) work and assessing picture merit dispassionately and with cold logic… Some photographers of the highest rank are capable of this detachment; most are not…” (p.142, On Being a Photographer by Bill Jay and David Hurn, LensWork Publishing, 2004).

His comments ring very true as I am editing and re-editing my work on Kiev’s underpasses… I find it incredibly difficult this time to make choices about which images to include and sequencing them in a way so that a coherent story emerges. Or to be precise, I find it difficult to make the final selection, to finish the last mile (it was relatively easy to cut down from 500 to say 100 images).

I made huge progress and leaped a few decisive steps forward yesterday in a tutorial with Paul who applied the ‘dispassionate and cold logic’ that Hurn was talking about and set me off in the right direction.

But why is it this time more difficult for me to edit my own work? It felt much easier in the “Gay Dads story” I did earlier in the year. The sequence and the choice of images almost emerged naturally. So what is different this time?

I guess one main difference is that the “Gay Dads story” had a clear linear narrative. There was a given sequence of events: ‘before the birth – birth – daily life after’ which dictated almost the way to tell the story. This time, with the underpasses story it is different. The storyline on the underpasses is a non-linear one. There are various ways to tell the story, so one (i.e. ultimately I) must make sometimes difficult choices on which way to advance the story, which slant to give the story: is it a melancholic one? A more upbeat one? Or both at the same time?

And there is another germane difference between these two stories, I discovered in an interesting conversation with a classmate recently. There is a difference in approach as well. Whereas in a linear/photojournalistic story such as the “Gay Dads story”, one “simply” follows the events. One has no control over events as such. There are choices of what to photograph and what to leave out but essentially the photographer tries to be present as much as possible and capture as much as possible. But there is generally no control over the sequence of events (a similar thing would be covering a war or a riot). The sequence of events (and often the outcome) is usually dictated by others (as in a war) or by life itself (the birth just happens).

In a more documentary, often non-linear, story such as the underpasses story, there is simply daily life, almost a series of “non-events” happening in front of your extended eye. There is no particular beginning or ending to it and you choose where to dig in with your camera, when to start and leave and what to focus on. The photographer in a sense creates the story which would fundamentally not be there wasn’t there an individual with an urge to tell it (I imagine, for example, Alec Soth lived through a similar experience when photographing his story on the Mississippi or Niagara).

And coming back to my initial point about editing: I am assuming that this is the reason (or rather one of the reasons) why it is more difficult to edit my underpasses story than the previous stories I have done.

Well, better get on with it and start drawing another storyboard…