What makes us stop to take some of the images that we do ?

Is it some inner voice that talks to us when we see a subject . Can we name it ” reaction recognition ” that over-rides our yes or no decision on the subject we see at hand ?

I saw this door a thousand times. There’s nothing unusual about it. I went out of it whenever I exited our fifth floor apartment, and in Europe, that means 6 flights up. In older Paris that means stairs…….a lot of them !

Somewhere around the 500th time I stopped to photograph it, don’t know why and didn’t stop to do a  ” chimp edit ” . I just carried on the day.

It became another 24mb in my 36 gig card that much later during my general edit stopped me. ” What the hell made me take that one, it’s not a showstopper, what could I’ve been thinking?

In this digital era, thinking is all about here and now. We  judge our images accordingly as soon they appear on our screen. We edit, trash, and move onto the next. We see no value in saving what’s been edited out. Maybe it’s because we are judging the surface of an image, a reflection of we saw. We fail to look behind the picture at the depth of what we felt either on a conscience or sub-conscience level.

The film era had an advantage. Without a dump to trash, it gave us some time and space to see our images unbiased, removed from the moment of exposure. Images appeared later in proofs or on a contact sheet. You couldn’t edit and discard them on the spot. They were left for later to judge, sometimes even for another year. They were all there to view in retrospect. As a forced way of saving it all , we could discover an overlooked image, one that would have been dumped to trash today.

Is this digital era making an exchange of what we feel for what we see by calling out an instant judgement that over rides the inner voice of Reaction Recognition ?

Images condemned to trash might speak to us later. They could help to tell us what that inner voice saying , and lead us to question the what and why. Maybe in the that answer we find out something about ourselves by what we have seen.

Discarded images could show us more than what was out there by showing us what is in here. I might have dumped this image on the spot or later in my edit but after stopping to listen inside, maybe for this Miami Photographer, the Yellow Door represented a crossroad, a decision of in or out, depending on where you stand.

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