The Film: Editing

Garry Winogrand would wait a year or more before processing a roll of film he’d exposed. Part of this was certainly due to his extremely prolific shooting habits but that’s not all. He didn’t want his memory of the experience of making a picture to influence his ability to judge its worth. Maybe he was shooting on a fine sunny morning with fantastic light and had beautiful women smiling at him everywhere he looked. Maybe in the afternoon Garry found a hundred dollar bill in the gutter and then later joined a friend for an epic meal, paid for by some unlucky stranger. Would that influence how he saw the pictures he took that day?

Very possibly.

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to wait a year, but I get where Winogrand was coming from and appreciate what even waiting a week or two can do to gain some perspective. Now, as I sift through the hundreds of selections I made from all the film I shot over the last year, I’m making different choices now than I did 9 months ago. Time does make a difference.

So back to film. You have to wait for it. For better or worse, you can’t check your shot and choose to delete it or share it with a thousand people a second after you made it. That’s how film enables a more objective approach to editing. You don’t have to be strong and disciplined. You just have to be little lazy or a little too busy.

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This is one in a series of posts I’m doing over the next week on using film during the Leica Year project.