Forgotten photos - Volume 1

Creatively and personally, I'm definitely a hoarder. Photos, music, old clothes, books I've read, old shoes. I try to be ruthless but I'm not good at getting rid of these things; they may have become obsolete but at a mere glance they all link me immediately to a specific time or place in my life.

Photographically, however, I'm indefinitely a hoarder. I won't be stopping anytime soon!

I take lots of photographs and I keep them - the good ones, the bad ones, the blurry ones and of course the ones that I might just change my opinion on. This doesn't mean they aren't organised, backed-up and in folders as they are (mostly!). I just don't delete the vast majority of images I take for a very long time and don't see this changing.

Often I find the increasing volume of photos I store a hindrance. A burden.

Like an achilles heel in my photographic endeavours. A mountain of digital information that I'll never summit.

This year I've decided to look at my hoarding as a positive. Maybe even go as far as to admit that I like it this way! As such, I'll be revisiting some of my 'forgotten photos' and sharing them in this new series of blog posts.

And anyway, who doesn't like finding something that they'd totally forgotten existed?! Or rediscovering something they'd created but neglected?

It's a great feeling!

I don't have much time to get out and shoot for myself at the moment, so being able to go back over my old photographs gives me my fix. Who knows, I might even rediscover some forgotten gems...

The 'forgotten photos' series probably won't really have a fluid theme or style. There will of course be many street shots but these will be infiltrated by family shots, landscapes, whatever.

Anything that grabbed my attention or I felt like shooting when I had the camera in my hand...

They might not even be deemed very good photographs, but so what?! I've got into the bad habit of thinking that every photograph I share has to be 'a keeper'. One that stops people in their tracks. One I would print and sell. One that might get me noticed amongst the swathes of images out there.

But anyone's creative journey is never really that perfect or idealistic, however much we might aspire to it. These images simply map out my journey, both in terms of my real life and my photographic one. In that respect, they all have value.

All images in this post were taken on a short family trip to Devon in 2017 when Bowie (my four month old son) was only a few weeks old, nabbing shots where I could using a fuji X100T and an XT1 with 16mm/56mm.

Thanks for reading,

Sonny

(All images in this blog post owned by Sonny Nathan)