What Is In The Box?

It looked neat....the Houston workroom just outside the door of the darkroom. So many times I've gathered up a stack of prints that have accumulated from the darkroom and put them in a box and stacked them away.

The Houston workroom has shelves built to hold boxes of prints, paper, mat board and all of the "stuff" in a photographer's life. But when I started opening boxes, it wasn't quite as tidy. The box might be labeled Puebla but there are prints from Yucatan and Oaxaca too. At some point I must have been pulling prints for some purpose and everything didn't get back in the box it came out of. Even more difficult is that I want to keep at least one darkroom print of an image because I don't know if I'll make anymore darkroom prints of these negatives. So I'm trying to figure out how many prints I have of each image because I have someone who wants to buy some prints from the Mexican church project.

And then there are boxes of prints from other photographers that I consider part of my collection. So each box of prints is taking a lot of time to go through and look at them in detail.

Five-by-seven boxes of proof prints that haven't been opened in at least seven years have been dumped. I am finding boxes of prints that I have no idea why I saved. Early prints and bad prints (most of the time an early print is a bad print), they are going in the trash too.

At this point, the workroom is in chaos. Hopefully when I get through figuring out what is in the boxes, the useless trash will have been hauled away and each box that remains will be properly labeled and everything will look neat again.