Memories flood back while culling archive of my early photos
By Autumn Payne
March 2022 - When I look back at the imagery I created early in my photographic journey, I am initially flooded with the feelings I had when I created them.
I remember the discontent of my early 20s. I remember reaching for my goals and always falling short as a student in the first few years of college.
The intent behind revisiting my archive was to throw this pile of substandard negatives into the trash. I had been carrying them around for more than 20 years, and they didn’t seem to be worth anything.
I sorted out negatives of people I was still in contact with and placed them in envelopes to send to them. I threw the rest in the trash and walked away.
But later that day I had second thoughts. I couldn’t resist taking a closer look at my friends 20 years younger, and as I did, another story revealed itself.
Roll after roll of film shows mostly women, draped in off-white fabric, often partially nude. At the time, I was seeking to create art that would represent a goddess incarnate. It was amateur and naive, and a little embarrassing, actually. I would read books on witchcraft and the spirituality of the feminine, and I would grab the nearest female friend and try to make art to spiritually feel real in my life.
It never did.
I left home at 18 years old and married my high school sweetheart. That marriage was troubled from the start and ended three years later, thankfully without children on board.
These were the negatives from those three years in my life. The time between beginning photography and becoming a photojournalist. That time when I fancied myself an artist but could not find my voice. Photojournalism became a welcome escape from my own story and into the story of someone else.
Twenty years later, my training as a photo editor comes into play. Over the years, my mentors demonstrated to me how a story is told not through the making of the pictures themselves, but from the edit afterward, from the investigation, the watching and the listening.
I learned that the role of art is not to answer questions but to pose them. Even then, that’s exactly what I was.
As I studied my old archive, the characters emerged:
￭ An 18-year-old military wife, pregnant with her second child, alone in military housing with her husband overseas. She was trying to sell Mary Kay cosmetics.
￭ A stripper who said she enjoyed using her body to make as much money as she could and who found emotional relief in her kleptomania.
￭ A 19-year-old Mexican man in the U.S. Navy who taught me his mother’s way of making enchiladas. We laughed as I painted his body for a photo shoot. I heard he died in combat.
￭ A Hungarian immigrant who could not speak English, pregnant with a little girl and very shy.
￭ A beautiful young Chamorro woman, half English by descent, with the nicest family. She seemed at one with the ocean where I photographed her.
And somehow, in all of this, I found a negative of myself in a swimsuit adjusting the off-white drape of my subject in the ocean. How that frame exists, I have no clue. We were alone, and I had placed my camera on a rock to help her, and somehow the camera created one frame that documented my pursuit.
After contemplating all of this, I went out to the trash can and retrieved about one third of my archive.
I threw away all of the photography tests and lighting exercises, but I kept the people and the stories.
The next day, my 7-year-old daughter crumpled up her drawing because she thought it wasn’t good enough. I pulled out the artwork she made when she was 5 and told her, “It’s not the quality of the work that matters in art; it’s the journey.”
Autumn Payne is an independent visual journalist based in Sacramento, California. She can be reached at autumnpayne.com. She is working on a documentary JudahtheLionheart.com. Autumn is founder of Mission Minded Media, an storytelling service for non-profits. She has been an NPPA member since 2001.
A few past columns of "Career & Life Balance":
What I learned from my 7-year-old-daughter, May 2021
Freelancing hasbn’t gone totally as expected, Nov/Dec. 2019
Building the next door that I open, Sept/Oct, 2019
Pulse tragedy proves catalyst for photojournalist’s personal change, July/Aug 2019
Familes helping one another: It’s what we’re meant to do, Jan/Feb 2019
