Editing

Published 2011 January 24

In photography the word ’editing’ traditionally means selecting the best photos from a set. This usually involves a large number of small pictures — ‘contact’ or ‘proof’ prints — laid out on a table, pinned to a wall, clipped to a string, or displayed in a user interface on a computer screen. The editor looks at the pictures, moves them around, culls the bad ones, keeps the best ones.

Frame 13, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans”

In the digital era the primary meaning of the word ’editing’ when applied to the word ‘photographs’ has become ’the manipulation of an image with photo editing software such as Photoshop’. Traditional editing became ‘photo organizing’ or ‘photo management’.

Editing means culling, improving, condensing, simplifying — removing the unnecessary, leaving the best. In this sense, when applied to photographs, and if you want to improve your photography, I think ’editing’ is a better word than ‘organizing’ or ‘management’, and it should be embraced in its traditional sense.

Endlessly manipulating a photograph with graphics software will not make it a better photograph or you a better photographer (though it will make a good picture sing). Taking more pictures, looking at them,¹ and choosing the best, will.

Despite much mythology such as Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment, the photographic act consists of two things: Shooting pictures and choosing which pictures to show.² Most people only do the first, but editing is at least as important as shooting. As in many things in life, you have to choose, difficult as it may be.

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody’s pictures suck, that’s how. I’ve seen Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand’s exposures sucked. It’s the way it is.

— Mike Johnston, The Magic Bullet