In the works : a retrospective of my work in the Rijksmuseum, some time after it opens in 2013.
16 october 2012 Since my agreement with the Rijksmuseum to donate the best part of my work, I have been rather busy delivering all the photographs which were ready for transport. The complete original prints for my books that I kept and did not use later on, an early hunch that paid off, are now in the museum. The process I'm now involved in, going through all my negatives, from 1962 onwards, has two purposes. First,I want to leave my house in order and get rid of all the material that has, after all, no meaning.That includes probably more than ninety eight percent of all my negatives or slides.At best this is the material that writers get rid of immediately in the working process as notes, made on the way to a better end.I must admit that I am struggling with the decision to throw away documentary material that might serve some purpose, now unknown, in the future. But usually that kind of doubt is disappearing fast when I consider how much has been documented by others photographers. One of the things I have been good at from the start is an ability to see when I had made an image that was better, within the limits of my talents.This has been an asset that served me well. On the other hand it makes the confrontation with the overwelming amount of rubbish that I have produced over the years, and that I recognise just as fast, rather puzzling. In sorting out my production untill now I stumble upon material that I have never printed.I have forgotten about it or I was too busy with the next thing to do.Some of these photographs hold up well and it is interesting to print these and to publish them as I did with the photographs I made in Portugal in 1974.These older images ( I am at the moment still stuck in the seventies ) also bring me back to people I knew, liked and loved, and consequently to the person I used to be.This brings up mixed feelings.
To be continued.
