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I've spent much of the past week throwing away pictures. Not just pictures but negatives, the ghostly reversed images from which photographs are made. . . were made.
A bride clutching her bouquet looks into my camera lens, a perfect smile on her radiant face, eyes alive to the thought that this moment, the way she looks right now, before her wedding, her perfect beauty, is being captured in a photograph that will last her lifetime and beyond.
Into the trash it goes, negatives and proof sheet, along with the same from dozens of other brides. Bye-bye.
Don't think me hard-hearted. I'm not. I'm the guy who weeps when Dumbo reaches through the prison bars to caress his mother's trunk. It pains me to throw away those beautiful pictures, but, hey, I kept them for 40 years! Those brides are grandmothers now. It's OK. I hope they had a good life and kept the prints.
As for the commercial photography I did 40 years ago as a freelance photographer in Salem, Va., it was easy to throw away those negatives and proof sheets. (Contact sheets is the proper name.) "Why do I still have these?" I asked myself.
And then there were the unexplainable close-up picture series of dead animal teeth and skulls I took in my early days as a photographer in college. I get a chill just looking at them now. Into the trash, quickly.
I was a young and callow fellow, I suppose, searching for something interesting to capture with my newfound love, photography.
The "callow fellow" phrase comes from "The Fantasticks," a beautiful, sentimental play about young love. It ran for a record 42 years off-Broadway. I was lucky enough to see it there in the late 1960s.
An immature, inexperienced yet optimistic young man is a callow fellow. That was me when Honey and I were young. We married, went, and did, all without much of a plan, believing things would work out, and they did work out, though not without some trials and heartache.
In "The Fantasticks," the young lovers are warned that pain would come, but by enduring it they would be better and their love deeper.
"Without hurt, the heart is hollow," says narrator/bandit El Gallo.
I photographed many weddings over the years and loved every one of them. People are generally the best versions of themselves at weddings. My job was to capture the event and participants in pictures that would please and endure.
Now and then a person I do not recognize will come up to me and say, "You shot my wedding pictures."
"Did I?" I respond, adding, "Are you still married?"
Forgive my poor memory. Probably if I saw the wedding photos I would remember. "Try to Remember" is the name of the song in "The Fantasticks." Pictures are my way of remembering, just as are the stories I tell in this column.
"Winnow" is another favorite word of mine. It is an ancient term for a step in the process of threshing, blowing away the chaff so only the grain remains. That's what I'm doing with my years of negatives and contact sheets. Winnowing the images that have no enduring meaning for me, no hold upon my heart.
Yes, I took pictures of flowers and insects and sunsets, but fairly early I realized that taking pictures of people was my real passion, both for my personal pictures of family and friends and my work as a news reporter and photographer. All those files of negatives, and there are hundreds, have yet to be winnowed. How many of my pictures will hold any meaning, any value, for anyone but me when I'm gone? It will be hard, hard, hard, but I'll do my best.
Forgive me, my children, for not throwing away more.