Rineke Dijkstra: “I scan the negatives and make them bigger so you can see them more. I shoot about two to three hundred rolls of film, if I am away for several months.†Then I reduce it down to whatever is needed for the magazine in question. From that, I then choose an average of six images per film. Sebastiao Salgado: “I do a first choice from contact sheets and then do many, many work prints. So when I’m home from an assignment, what I mostly do is go looking for those ‘successful’ pictures, hoping that I wasn’t kidding myself or that I didn’t screw up.†I express myself visually, not verbally.â€Įugene Richards: “I pretty much know that a photograph is ‘successful’ or not when I take it. If it were intellectual, I’d be able to explain what happens. But when editing, I do contact sheets, then machine prints and then select from that.â€Īnd when asked what makes one image stand out more than another, is it emotional or an intellectual reaction he answers: “It must be intuitive. Martin Parr: “You usually have a hunch, but the great thing about photography is that it’s so unpredictable, so you never quite understand how and when a good photograph comes about. We place all the enlarged scans side by side which makes it easier to see which frames are the best. Someone in my studio then scans my edits and enlarges them to approximately 5×7. When I’m editing my own work, I do a first general edit. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to edit. Mary Ellen Mark: “Editing is extremely difficult. These quotes are taken from the book Image Makers, Image Takers by Anne-Celine Jaeger. Other photographers discuss their approach to editing. I’m envisaging there will be about half the number of photographs in the book than there were for Motherland. The book won’t be going into production until Spring next year. With regards We English, the editing process will be made slightly easier as the 5×4″ negative is a lovely size to preview, which means I won’t have to scan as many images. I also made 10×8 prints of all the photographs which were used for colour matching at the printers. They were then turned into CMYK files for the printers. The final stage was to prepare the 153 scanned photographs, getting the colours correct and doing some slight cleaning up in photoshop. I was too emotionally attached to the photographs and in several cases wanted to select images that just weren’t strong enough or didn’t fit as a whole. It was critically important that I had an external eye (and someone I trusted and respected) to help with the editing. This was done with the help of some editors, most notably Chris Boot, my publisher. Then finally mark the definitive photographs on all four sides-Īfter a couple of months I gradually (and somewhat painfully) whittled the 500 images down to the final book edit of 153 photographs. I’d start with a small cross in the top left corner with a yellow chinagraph. Over the course of a few weeks I would return to the photographs marking those images that I was most interested in. Here are a couple of pages from the book. These sheets were then spiral bound into a book. This selection of images I scanned on an Imacon and then made larger contact sheets. On my return to England I made a wide edit of 500 images from the contact sheets. Critically, it also meant I could check that the camera/ lenses were working properly and that the film hadn’t been fogged by some Soviet-era airport security scanner. It also allowed me to evaluate how each stage of the project was developing, what themes were emerging and work out what I needed to be looking for during the next stage of shooting. This enabled me to do some editing during the course of the journey. Every three months, on my return to Moscow to get a visa extension, I had the film processed and contact sheets made. To produce Motherland I shot just over 5000 frames during the course of my year traveling across Russia (for the techies among you, I used a Mamiya 7 camera with Kodak Portra 220 film). I’ve also pulled out some quotes from other photographers who discuss their approach to editing. I’ll do this using my first book, Motherland, as a case study. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to briefly outline how I normally edit my work. It usually does, and although short lived, it can be quite overpowering! I’ll set them aside for a few days and come back with fresh eyes. I’ve had a quick scan through them and I’m trying not to let the wave of ‘contact-sheet depression’ set in. Amongst the few hundred frames I’ve shot (about 1500 to be precise), I now have to tease out a coherent selection of photographs. Here it is, a pile of contact sheets that represent the fruits of my labour from the past six months.
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