The other day I made the rather foolish mistake of looking back at some of my old work – a process that almost inevitably ends in the question “Why didn’t someone stop me?”
At the time of course I was very proud of that work and it’s certainly interested to look back and see how our work has evolved over time – the concepts that were born on our very first shoot some of which we still stand by today and then the things that have changed utterly and that are almost unrecognisable from our first experiments with a new media. Sometimes though it’s not so much the concepts but the execution that only gets better with practice, and it’s that transient state of evolution that separates the professional from the amateur – the constant dedication to moving forward and improving your work, to leaving behind the “good” and striving (successfully or not) only for the mind-blowing.
Every photographer and videographer I’ve spoken to says the same thing – they generally can’t stand looking back upon old work and as soon as they do they feel the urgent need to re-edit it and try to correct the mistakes they made back then but re-editing old work is a fruitless activity. Your style may change over time and your execution may improve, but that old work is an important part of the journey and in a few years time you would only need to update it once again when you stare back at the work you’re doing right now and wonder what you were thinking…
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Photograph by Lucy Ray
But as I went through this slightly self-deprecating process I started to wonder, do all creative people think this way about their old work? Did Da Vinci look back at the Mona Lisa and think “I was really rubbish at painting smiles back then”? Did Michelangelo stare up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel years later and ask himself “Why didn’t I just go with Magnolia?” Did Picasso wake up the next morning and ask himself “what the hell was I drinking last night?”
To the creative mind the work is never considered perfect for long and even a critically acclaimed masterpiece is unlikely to satisfy those yearning to evolve and improve at all times. Few bands, for example, seem to enjoy playing “the hits” yet for perhaps thousands of people those songs they created years ago still define everything about that group of musicians whether they like it or not.
Sometimes we are not the best judge of our own work and it takes others to remind us that actually maybe it wasn’t so bad back then, maybe getting those exposures wrong and standing in that frankly ridiculous position is the reason we’re getting it right now, maybe where we started from wasn’t such a bad place, maybe however much we think it could be improved with hindsight the people we made it for love it as much now as they did then. Maybe we should keep our past safe in a little green bag and take the occasional peak back to keep us steady on our forward track.
