Curation of Physical and Digital Photos
The following is an excerpt from Adam Pratt’s Declutter Your Photo Life
WHAT IS CURATION?
We usually hear the word curation in relation to museums and art galleries, but art curators aren’t focused on throwing away the mediocre pieces. A curator selects the best material to put on display. There are thousands of pieces of art and history in warehouses, basements, and private collections, but in a museum we see the best items only.
This is instructive for us as photographers because most people use the word culling, which is more about deleting your bad photos. Honestly, most of us are taking so many photos that we can’t afford to just cull out the bad ones. Instead, you should keep the best and delete the rest. Turning the curation process upside down is a big shift in thinking, but it will be a more delightful experience for you, and you will create a better photo archive for posterity.
If you start with clear criteria, then the process is simpler, even pleasant. For personal photo collections, Adam has a list of recommendations for photos you want to keep. Rocky Nook Publishers has made this chapter of Adam’s best selling book, Declutter Your Photo Life, available for you to read on their website.
Adam ends this chapter with a few final words of wisdom.
CURATE WITH PURPOSE
The deduplication process deletes lots of photos quickly, but the curation process takes more time and demands your brain and your heart. Making these decisions means you must look at your photos with a critical eye, but a thoughtfully curated photo archive is a joy for you and a blessing to others.
Ansel Adams, one of the greatest photographers of all time, wrote, “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” I’m not suggesting you should keep only your best twelve photos from each year, but I think we can all learn from Ansel to slow down our photography, compose more carefully, and curate more purposefully.
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