As gnarly and dubious as it is..

Resident Alien. Part 9.

I found this photo in a packet of prints that had been discarded from the original Resident Alien selection. Prints that did not make it up onto the wall as part of the final 2012 edit. This photo was in the first of 2 packets of rejects that I opened and I found it near the front. Seeing this photograph made me realize immediately that I would now need to go back and carefully review all of the original memory cards from this period and start my selection there, at the very beginning and from scratch. I had wondered if I could pick up on the trail of this 2012 print edit after first reacquainting myself with it, with the intention of returning to the original digital files later, to simply locate each image for re-editing and printing.

Having this original edit as 4x6 inch prints has been helpful for me to envision the volume of the pictures I am working with and it has been fun moving them around into pairs and pages to see how this looks here and what that looks like there. I’ve been enjoying myself and in the process I am indeed reacquainting myself with it. Pairs and spreads gravitate to one another while others wait in the wings for second thoughts. I’ll get an idea of what it needs and what I might need to keep an eye out for later. 

It's true that right now this selection is incomplete and long out of date and catching this photo in a discarded package confirms this. The prints were originally made up of all my favorite images from 2012 and I was a different person back then. In the last 10 years I have changed and my tastes have changed too. Even after initially sorting the prints into roughly 2 distinct piles of “yeps and nopes”, my pile of nopes was over twice the size of the yeps pile. This tells me my personal criteria for judging what I believe makes a “good” picture has changed too, a lot.

 

I only have the vaguest memory of taking this photo (Omaha Nebraska, I think, but I cannot be sure) but it indicates there may well be more as yet undiscovered photos waiting to be found. This floating potential key image of interest, this missing link, as gnarly and dubious as it is, marks the very beginning of the process of really considering this body of work with fresh eyes.