36,703 photographs in three weeks

I spent three weeks in Japan. I took 36,703 photographs.

Not in bursts. One frame at a time, every day, by instinct. The finger pressing the shutter before the mind has decided anything. It’s the only way I know how to work. Japan didn’t change that. It amplified it. There is something in this country that makes availability easier, as if the street itself were in constant motion and all you had to do was let yourself be carried by it.

I came back with 36,703 files and the feeling that I had lived three weeks at an abnormal speed. During the last days in Osaka, I wasn’t really sleeping anymore. I was shooting, coming back, looking at a few images without really seeing them, then going out again.

I’m 15% into the edit. For now, 250 remain.

250 out of 36,703 is less than 0.7%. That number should worry me. It doesn’t. It feels right. Maybe even still too generous.

Editing is not a process of selection. It is a process of forgetting. The vast majority of these images existed for one reason only: to keep me in a state of total availability for three weeks. They did their job during the act of photographing. They don’t have to survive afterwards.

What remains — the 250, and whatever will remain after the second pass, the third — are not the best photographs. They are the images that resist being forgotten. That is not the same thing. A good photograph can very well disappear in the edit because it says something I have already said, or something I no longer want to say. An imperfect image can remain because it carries a tension that nothing else in the series carries.

I don’t know how many will be left in the end. I’m not setting a number. I know photographers who give themselves quotas, who aim for a precise ratio. I understand the logic. It doesn’t fit me. A series does not have a quota. It has a necessity. When the edit is finished, I will know how many were needed.

For now, I’m 15% in, and 250 images are still standing. The remaining 85% are waiting for me.