3 days left.... (for my thesis)

Like any good Novel, my last few weeks of studying have multiple storylines. While I have three days left for my thesis (climax soon) I have been working on some other projects as well - like the office (tommorow the first pictures) and Iniana Jones (This one has a little less priority). But I've also been going trough my archive to look at old work.

I decided to send all the photos from three major trips from last year (Paris, Crete and Belgium) to the local cheap photostore. Just as an experiment. Since im trying to get an overview of my work, so i can select something for the exhibition, i thought it might just be nice to have something physical to work with.
I ended up with an innocent looking package today:



But for me, even an innocent package like this can turn out to be a complete bom explosion.
I enthousiastcly started unpacking in my room - and randomly organising some of the images.



Well - its not too bad actually. But having 400+ images in your hand can be quiet overwhelming. Its like having a gigantic Jigsaw Puzzle to solve! It all of the sudden reminded me of a co-student from a couple of years ago. His name was Afong, and (just like mister NY arseni) took endless pictures of his daily life. He had EVERYTHING printed digtally, that resulted in a huge archrive from 5 years of shooting images everyday. I remember he confiscated the hallway in the AKI, and had just random piles of photographs everywhere. You can see it a little bit over here, but im pretty sure he had over 10.000 images there.



He went crazy. He had to make a selection for his final show, but he couldnt do it. We had long talks, and as you can see on this picture he occasionally asked other students to help him. However, I was convinced he should do something with the fact he has so much. It said so much about how we use photography today. At the end however, he choose 6 pictures.
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6 pictures out of 10.000! It turned out to be very boring.....

But now, being in the same situation as Afong (only with a little less then ten thousand pictures) I realise how hard it is to overcome this step. These days its not about the pictures itself, but the context we place em in - the curation - and the way we present the images. Im trying to overcome the "picture, picture" trap. Im not happy with the idea of choosing my top 10, and frame them nicely for the end expo.

Photography can be so much more these days, but I dont really know what it can be....yet