Being a photographer means being an archivist -†It always astounds me when people say things to me like “you probably deleted them a long time ago, but is there any chance you still have the pictures from X?” – given how much of my energy I pour into these images, I can assure you that the plan is to keep them around for a long, long time…

here’s a short film on my work by documentary filmmaker and photo archivist John Pettit – it won third place in First Person Arts’ documentary competition.

The numbers that I quote aren’t quite accurate- I hadn’t realized it then, but I was already well over the half million image mark.†It’s definitely a bit nerve wracking that most of what I have to show for myself now is all intangible digital data- but everything’s safely backed up in quadruplicate and off site…

The thing about having amassed such an archive of images is that there’s a far greater challenge than managing all of the pictures on the computer: managing all of the pictures in my brain! Somehow or other they’re all still in there, every single one, and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by them. Everywhere I go, I recognize faces that I photographed years before, and it can create a lot of anxiety, because just as the photos don’t age, it’s harder to let those memories fade into the past.

I’ve had to make very concerted efforts to try to let go of them a little bit to avoid letting myself get tied to the past too much by the images; while my work self needs to administer the archive, my personal self needs to focus on living in the present.

If you really want to go digging around through the past however, you can find a big selection of my unedited galleries at jjarchive.net – they’re not all up there, and it’s entirely too many pictures for anyone to dig through, but if you’re either really bored, or looking for something in particular, you can take a peek…