By Wayne Cosshall

 It is easy to get taken away by our latest images and forget to revisit our library of previous work.

All of life contains cycles and change. We read a new photography book, attend an exhibition, or go to a workshop and suddenly we are a bit different than we were before. Sometimes more than a bit. Over time we change substantially. And this is what we want, because if we are standing still we have either given in to ego or to stagnation and repetition.

An extremely interesting exercise is to revisit images we shot some time ago. And I don’t just mean the ones we have printed or exhibited. It’s also worth re-examining the great, unwashed mass of images that we never did anything with, at the time.

Suppose you look at images you shot five years ago. When you examine these in the light of five years of growth as an artist you will likely make different decisions. You may no longer like the direction you took some images during processing. Or, you may now see potential in some of the images you previously rejected, perhaps by using some new processing technique you have learned or with a changed aesthetic. And, you may find work that now fits perfectly into a new series you are working on.

Another great value in examining your back library is to reflect on your abilities. Sometimes it is easy to forget just how far we have come as artists, how much our tastes have changed, and how much our shooting and processing techniques have improved. When I look back at my body of work I find some images I still adore and others that I no longer value, no longer consider good enough to exhibit.

Sometimes we discover that we have gone backwards. Perhaps a line of work we started then dropped held huge potential. Or maybe a previous way of working (before we adopted a workflow recommended by someone else) was in fact better fitted to our personalities and aesthetics.

Digging through your back images is not easy. Most of us have large libraries of film and/or digital images. The sheer volume can seem overwhelming.

So part of your organizational skill should be devoted to making it easy (or at least reasonably possible) to re-examine images taken long ago. This might involve storing your trannies and negatives in film sheets that allow you to quickly examine a whole lot of images in one hit.

Or, it could mean storing your digital files on a large file server or cataloging your CDs and DVDs of backup images in a program that generates and stores decent- sized previews so you can examine a lot of digital images while the original files remain offline.

However you do it, make it happen.

Your back library can be like striking a huge vein of gold in your own backyard, something you can mine at your leisure. Cast your new eyes over the work and see what you can extract. Can you use a cropped section? Can you extract a component and montage it into another image? Can you improve an image using localized enhancements that you didn’t know how to do last time you examined the image?

Don’t get sucked into believing that since you have improved as a photographer that all your past work will be rubbish. Even if your work has taken a quantum leap in quality, such change is rarely an instantaneous event. Rather it is a process over time in which there will be hints of what is to come. Most likely, you’ll find the odd image or two that hinted at your future talent. It would be a shame to lose these images.

The best image you will ever take might be sitting in your back image library, untouched and unloved.