As photographers we generally believe in the assumption that the moment we press the shutter, the important work is over. But I'm not sure it does. Over the past few months, I've been thinking a lot about what happens after a photograph is made. Not just by throwing it into an editing software, adding potential presets, play with contrast or colour, but actually about editing in its much older and broader sense, what I mean by this is, thinking about editing as the process of deciding what a photograph should ultimately become. During the course of summer, I've looked at different working methods of photographers I admire and I realised that some of the most important decisions we make as photographers also happen after we've put the camera down — during the editing.
The Photograph Is Not Finished When You Press the Shutter
An article on editing, interpretation and on the potential of seeing our own photographs again
Ansel Adams compared the negative to a composer's score and the print to its performance. I think this was my guiding thought throughout these months because in an age where we're so used to seeing the image on the back of the camera seconds after making it. That file can easily feel like the finished photo. But it isn’t. I’m of a similar opinion to that of Ansel Adams, musical scores usually contain the information required for a piece of music, but it still needs someone to interpret it. And musicians can begin with exactly the same score and still create different performances. And Ansel Adams defended that something similar happened within photography. The negative provided a sort of foundation, while the darkroom gave him numerous opportunities to interpret it. Today, I think the RAW file occupies a very similar if not the same position: it is a starting place with great possibilities. And in the video I made about Ansel Adams’ editing techniques I said that this way of thinking changes us, because it inherently makes you think more intentionally about a given photograph by believing that you can transform it into what you want it to become.
Adams’ concept of visualisation is also wroth mentioning in this instance, because it was based around anticipating the finished image before making the actual exposure. Editing, from this perspective, isn't only about correction, its about making sure the image and its original intention are interpreted. This also introduces something I think photographers sometimes struggle with: there may not be one definitive version of a photograph. From what I read, Adams himself kept working with the same negatives throughout his life and produced different prints from them. But…
The Negative Is Only the Beginning
There is also form of editing that happens before we ever start editing and that is — selection. When we look at the finished books and exhibitions of great photographers, we don’t see the missed moments, awkward compositions, repetitions and thousands of photographs they ultimately decided weren't worth showing to an audience. Look at how Elliott Erwitt working a scene between a lady and her tiny dog, becomes eventually a ‘famous photograph’, looking at this contract sheet we know that the image is not the result of an isolated moment of genius. We can watch the photographer’s attention shift, his position change and different compositions appear until eventually the see frame we recognise emerges amongst several others and due to an enormous crop of the original image.
What this tells us is that in so many words, those unsuccessful frames also matter. Photographer David Hurn described the contact sheet as a “valuable instructor.” By saying something along the lines of if something interested us enough to press the shutter but the resulting photo doesn't work or do it justice, there is potentially something to learn from that discrepancy. Instead of deleting the failures and moving towards the photos we like, perhaps occasionally we should study the ones we don’t like or didn’t work!
Editing Is Also Learning What to Leave Behind
This act of selecting your images and editing them becomes even more challenging for us photographers because we're emotionally attached to our images and also because let’s face it no one likes to see their failures really, but remaining humble and open can really be fruitful ever. Move beyond the initial frustration and ask yourself is there something valuable you can take from there?
Robert Frank's editing process offers an interesting counterpoint to this. He physically arranged and grouped contact prints, judging the photographs one beside one another rather than judging each one in isolation. That’s how during the making of The Americans, he was able to reduce thousands of photographs to eventually just 83. He spoke eloquently on a few occasions about the importance of building a healthy distance between you and your work, however, I don’t think anyone has ever pushed that distance further than photographer Garry Winogrand. Winogrand was known to wait for long periods of time before developing his film, partly because he wanted to separate his memory of making the photograph from his judgement of the photograph itself. Now I’m not suggesting we spend years apart from our work but there is something valuable in the principle. Sometimes we need enough distance to see our photographs as photographs again and this distances avoids making emotional decisions when it comes to the logic of a project, book, exhibition and so on.
Learning to See Our Own Work
This was the idea behind a small community experiment I recently created in collaboration with Skylum Luminar. Where I asked photographers to return to their existing images and reinterpret them in Luminar, meaning, they would be treating the software not as a tool to “fix” an image and more like a “modern darkroom”. What mattered to me was having a reason for doing it. And I chose three photographers that took part in it: Daniel, Sebastian and Steven (you may find links to some of their social media in this article, so give them a quick look).
And I think their before-and-after images illustrate the idea far better than another paragraph ever could. Daniel's landscape is perhaps the clearest example of how an edit can redirect our attention without fundamentally changing the subject or the initial image. The original image had that extraordinary shaft of sunlight falling across the fields. And in the edited version, he keeps the but the darker foreground and making the greens richer makes that patch of golden light much more dominant and poetic. His black-and-white photograph of the cyclists is another interesting yet softer approach. The edited version increases the tonal separation dramatically and drama is the key word for this photograph: the cyclists become brighter against a much darker surrounding, making the fleeting gesture at the centre feel stronger and immediately our brain wonders over ideas of enjoying the small moments within life’s rapid pace. The poetry of everyday life, that’s what comes to my mind.
The Modern Darkroom Project
Daniel Guiomar's Instagram
Sebastian's photograph, on the other hand, shows us just how radically interpretation can alter the way we read an image and just by changing mainly one element — colour. The original is a colour street photograph. In the edited version, removing all colour immediately strips away information from the surrounding architecture and clothing, and instead of wondering about where this photo was taken, what might potentially be happening around the moment, what is the very thing the central person is pointing at, with the black and white, the deepened contrast pushes more towards the simple act of pointing and admiring how beautiful the tonal and light details are in this given moment.
One simple change made my experience of this image change with it. Now Steven's photograph is particularly interesting because the transformation is quite restrained when compared with the last examples we discussed. The scene itself is already built around the strong contrast between the dark interior and the figure standing in the doorway. His edit retains that main structure of the image, while subtly and tastefully may I add changing the tonal and colour relationships around it. So, sometimes what we need to think about is that reinterpretation doesn’t mean big changes, sometimes it can mean just polishing details or subtle elements that might elevate an image.
Nowadays we can edit forever… At some point, however, another adjustment might be overworking the photograph and might fundamentally bring it further away from what was our intention for it in the first place. That’s when I believe the photograph should be finished. When it finally expresses what we wanted it to express. Comparing the results of the community project involving contemporary photographers and the results of photographers of the past, we have to recognise that, technologically speaking, tools have indeed changed, but the underlying process has not. And maybe that’s one of the most interesting roles editing plays in photography. It teaches us to understand our photographs. To be more intentional about the work we produce as photographers and about it introduces reflection and a healthy degree of self-criticism which ultimately are two skills important in order to craft a more authentic path in whatever you do or create with your photography.
This article was created in collaboration with Skylum Luminar. Luminar has been my digital darkroom throughout this project and was also used by the participating photographers to reinterpret their work. You can try Luminar now: https://l.skylum.com/Tatiana-Hopper
When Is a Photograph Finished?
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