It’s the 4th of July, 2007 here in Philadelphia, and I’m getting ready to tackle a pretty ridiculously overwhelming project.

Redoing my website is the easy part of it. My friend Ilya’s helping me set up all the back end infrastructure side of it, and that’s almost taken care of. The part that I’m stuck with, which kind of terrifies me, is the part where I have to go through all of the pictures.

Here’s the problem: for the last several years, I’ve been running in a kind of manic mode. I’ve gotten really fast at my basic postproduction routine-> Shoot something, do a really quick first edit to weed out the junk, make backup copies, put the whole unedited take online for people to look through, and then dash off to the next thing.

The move to digital photography has made it possible to take out the film processing time, and the print processing time… but the problem is that that was also some time spent mentally processing experiences. That’s something that I haven’t been making the time to do. Just constantly running on to the next thing without really taking the time to make sense of what I’d just done.

Not to mention the fact that I haven’t been making the time to go back and decide what to do with those pictures- which are my favorites that I should show you? Now it’s a few years later and my website still looks the same even though I’ve done a lot.. and I’m sitting on this giant archive of images… and really need to figure it all out.

So, here’s the plan: I’m going to start the completely ridiculous process of retroactively blogging the last few years of my life. It’ll serve to generate some content, so that there’ll be a history of posts when the site goes live. But more important to me is the thing that’ll be happening on my end of it-> I’m going to be going back through my whole digital archive (the film before that is a whole other story) and sifting through it, from November 2002 on to present day.

It’s going to be a chance to update the portfolio, and organize the archive a bit better. But it’s also going to be completely overwhelming and heartbreaking, as it’s going to mean flying through four years worth of forgotten memories- looking at the shining faces of beautiful people that I met and never followed up with- but also joyous, looking at some of the wonderful things that brought me to where I am today.

The posts may be brief, without a ton of information- this part is mostly for my own benefit. Once I make it through to present day, then we’ll get on with the new stuff… this is all about clearing out the backlog.

The point is, that I’m going to look back through all of this stuff to get to a point where I feel caught up, and understand how I got here today, and from there, I’ll be looking forward to whatever comes next…

Thanks for bearing with me…

xo,

-jj