If I Could Begin Again

  No this isn't one of those posts about going back in time and changing your life around. It's about one particular thing that I would change. Yes, I wish I pursued photography more strongly in 1995 but that just would've meant I'd have been poor ten years earlier. This about in 2012 when I decided to begin to print and archive my portfolio with hopes of it ending up in a museum collection or something my wife could sell after I'm gone. First up was printing the 1000 photo Philadelphia Project which took almost a year to complete. My first mistake was printing it on 13"x19" paper which doesn't sound large until you need to find space for all the portfolio boxes that were quickly piling up. I should have printed it on 11"x17" paper and while a couple of inches doesn't seem like much you actually be surprised. But if that wasn't bad enough there are several portfolios of New York City and the Ben Franklin Bridge that I printed even larger at 17"x22". What the hell was I thinking ! I was thinking that I was always going to be living in a large loft with lots of space, even vertical space. So here we are in 2019 and I began photographing on the streets again but I wanted to have a way to be able to look at the photos that isn't digital so I started printing them out on 8.5"x11" paper and inserting them into portfolio books. This way I can show others too. I never look at my boxed printed archive because I'm afraid of damaging the prints (ink and paper isn't cheap) but now with this new method I don't worry. So right now I'm kicking myself for not doing this in the beginning because I can really picture a large bookcase lined with these albums and frankly a library of photographs that can be looked through now is a hell of a lot more interesting than a print archive that no one might be interested in in the future.