As a documentary photographer, the most heartbreaking and painful process for me is the editing process. In my fine art page, I have three galleries. The most recent gallery page made was named Boy Scouts of Troop 101 and will be the example of my editing process.
The majority of my fine art and documentary projects are photographed on film. The medium forces me to photograph in more deliberate way due to its finite quality. The Boy Scouts of Troop 101 was one of my longest-term documentary projects. It was shot over four years starting from 2009. After counting the amount of negative sleeves and subtracting negatives for other projects. I shot over 1000 individual photographs of this project.
The first part of the process is going through the negatives and selecting the first batch of images. I chose the images based on composition, moment, and lighting. After selecting and making notes, I scanned the selected images on the Epson V700. After the first round of editing and scanning, I had pool of about forty images to curate from.
The last step is selecting the images to tell a narrative of the scouts I was photographing. This means I had to remove images that worked well on their own but didn’t work well with the over all narrative. Once I had the final selection. The project consisted of only eleven images.
Boy Scouts of Troop 101, was the most daunting project to edit. Through out the entire process I was selecting fewer images. Many of which had great photographic moments. However, they didn’t fit into the narrative I wanted to tell. Once the project was finished I realized I was only showing about one percent of this four-year project. Some how it made me realise a photographer can tell a powerful narrative with a small number of photographs than an entire books worth of images.