Laurent Baig

It’s been a couple years since my hard drive crashed and all my work files ended up down the digital toilet. That’s when my serious lack of motivation started. Interestingly, as I start playing with the tools again (scanner, photoshop, organization, etc), I find I’m taking the opportunity to clean up. Clean up what? Crappy images.  We all take them and just because I shoot 4×5 doesn’t mean that my images are somehow more special for it.  It simply means that I can blow my crappy image up with greater detail in larger prints.

So, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been meticulously going over my archives and have thrown out probably on the order of 200 to 300 slides. By digital standards, that’s probably two or three days of work (maybe I’m the only one laughing), but for me that represents probably 100 to 150 days worth of shooting.  At that rate, it’s no wonder I held on to the film as long as I did – not to mention at $5 a pop, it’s upwards of $1500 that I’m literally throwing away. I could buy a decent digital camera for that.

But, this isn’t a film versus digital debate.

This IS about taking time to look where you are at and seeing yourself as you are.  I looked at myself and saw a hoarder of crappy images.  It was time to let that go. Self review is important, not just for weeding out those images that a photographer invariably tries to hold on to for whatever reasons, but for anyone at any stage of life or activity. Question who you are, why you are doing what you are doing, and what do you truly want out of it. You may not initially come up with answers and it’s not necessary to do so. It’s more important to develop one’s recognition of consciousness or lack thereof.

I’d unconsciously been hoping that, with time, those crappy images would get better. They didn’t. I could have recognized that a long time ago if I’d been more open to it. In fact, if I weren’t so hell bent on trying to make art, I probably would have recognized it before I clicked the shutter.

It’s been a long time since I picked up my camera, hopped into the truck and drove into the desert with no clue of where I would end up. It felt good to breathe the fresh desert air laden with moisture from a recent winter storm.  Clouds are so rare in Arizona that as I saw the afternoon passing, I felt more and more the urge to leave work and put my 4runner to the test on some dirt roads.

I’m not sure why I haven’t been in the mood to photograph.  I think maybe I tried to make too much out of photography. Instead of letting it be what it is, I tried to make it a profitable business. Truth is, at least with my approach to photography, it’s simply not going to be.  Let’s face it, there are more photographers out there today than you can shoot and the ego in me rages at the success of the ones I think are much worse than me.

It’s the recognition of ego that is allowing me to pick the camera up again and use it as a tool to focus my attention. I am not my thoughts, and the ego is all about thought generation, for example, thoughts of creating a better image than some other photographer. I have thoughts, and that’s okay, however, I do not need to be governed by them.  When I am free from thought, I can see more clearly and then I can point the camera to what I know will be a good image. When I am free from thought, creativity can flourish because I’m not concerned that Tom, Dick, or Sally are selling images on the internet. When I am free from thought, I’m not worried about how Guy, Michael, Dykinga, or Adamus, or any other incredibly talented photographers whose work I’ve admired would photograph where I am.  I’m free to enjoy the action of creating a photograph for the sake of the action of creating a photograph. If a wonderful photograph results, that’s nice too.