When Garry Winogrand died, aged just 56, he left an astonishing number of films undeveloped (2500), plus another 6,500 that were developed but had not even been proofed. So, by my reckoning, that's a staggering 324,000 images that he had made, but never even examined.
Meanwhile Pierre Bonnard, the post-impressionist painter with an especially keen interest in colour, had a process that could not have been more different. He worked on lots of paintings at the same time, often taking years before they found their way to galleries and collectors. But, even then, he still reserved the right to alter them later - and there are lots of fantastic stories about him smuggling paint and brushes into The Louvre and other galleries, with a friend distracting the guards while Bonnard made his alterations.
But the two men seem to me to have had some important similarities. Because Winogrand wanted, essentially, to forget about all the images on a film until he finally reviewed them, sometimes years later. Meanwhile Bonnard reserved the right to alter his work as time went by, and as new pigments became available. In other words the passage of time itself was an essential part of both mens' creative process.
And I am beginning to understand the importance of the x-axis too, because my own practice has always been boringly consistent and conventional - and hugely flawed. Because typically I process my films as soon as I can, and so I have a clear idea of what the least-worst pictures on the roll will be, before I even examine the film..
And what that means is that I often miss the most interesting images, and only discover some of them many years later. Because, as Winogrand so sagely implied, what things look like photographed is by no means always the same as the way they looked to the photographer when they pressed the shutter. And if we look at pictures too soon we are in danger of confusing one with the other.
Take the picture above, made in 1990 during my year-long hound trailing project, and showing the betting ring. In the 35 summers since it was taken I've been through all of the pictures periodically, and yet I only found this one as I was assembling pictures for this website. It had never been printed, much less exhibited or published.
But suddenly I like it a lot: the immaculate bookies' clerk, that chalk-ready tongue, the figures and Lakeland landscape in the background. It's a vanished rural world, really.
So what I take from all this is that many photographers, myself included, should take a leaf out of Bonnard and Winogrand's book and review our old work periodically - one way or another. As a former journalist I do have a real 'file and forget' mindset, and I'm far from sure that it's helpful. So I almost certainly won't follow my own advice. But then you already knew that, didn't you?
