As an assignment photographer here in Tokyo, Japan, shooting portraits, reportage, corporate etc for clients I do end up with a lot of tear sheets. Luckily. But also unluckily. Luckily I get commissions and luckily most clients are good enough to supply me with tear sheets. Unluckily, these tear sheets have built up in a pile in the corner of the office, getting taller, and messy, and growing yellow with age. Today the time had come to have a cull, and it got me thinking of my tear sheets through the years.

I used to keep everything- every newspaper which had a photograph of mine it it, or every magazine, every book cover etc. But then a few years back that was becoming too unmanageable. So I made a rule – no newspapers unless it was a great usage of a pic, or a large spread. So that helped cut down all the bundles of paper laying around in boxes. A fire hazard all of it’s own. I sifted through all the boxes I already had, did a cull, kept the good ones. Smiled at some images which took me back to 19whatever. I winced as I saw some bad images, or was reminded of unpleasant assignments. Laughed as I saw my colleagues images and remember the banter in the workroom at the end of our shifts. Memory lane growing yellow in a few boxes.

So then for a few years I only kept magazines, and occasional good spreads from papers. The magazines were better, less likely to fade and age in that yellow way. But even then the pile grew. A pile of memories in old issues growing haphazardly in the corner.

Then I got wise. We’d entered the digital age. I started asking every client, except for papers, for pdf files of all my magazine spreads. In the week the article goes to press, or the day after, I’d ask the picture editor or art director. And 9 times out of 10 they’d send me it. Great, pdf’s, easy to file, easy to manage, easy to reproduce, easy to put on a website, and they don’t fade and grow yellow in the corner of the room. Memories as pixels.

So that was 9 out of 10 art directors. The 10th art director still insists on sending 8 copies of the magazine.  Now occasionally it is nice to get the physical magazine, especially if you have the cover or a large spread, or it is nice in some way. But I don’t remember ever really needing 8 copies of a ‘humdrum spread from the not the most exciting assignment’. So usually a pdf suffices these days. And occasionally even a pdf is too much if they’ve made a dog’s dinner of a layout.

One magazine I get sent these days with my work in it comes in a great deep red coloured envelope, and occasionally the envelope is the thing I look forward to most.

So today, it was time for a cull. The pile of magazines was getting dusty. It wasn’t growing as fast as it used to due to the pdf’s coming now into my inbox. It was time to sift through them, find the pages which matter, scalpel them out, staple them together. It’s kind of fun. Going back through them. Sometimes I’d see the magazine cover and I’d know exactly what images of mine were in it, what the article was. Other times I’d see a magazine and have no idea what was inside, getting a pleasant surprise when I find a spread of work. Sometimes it’d be a good use of images, sometimes not so nice. There was the Saab magazine, a great spread of Tokyo images creatively laid out on red pages. The Haruki Murakami portraits in two magazines, nicely used, big, and funnily a good title ‘Found in Translation’ used in both. And making me smile, just a small 2 x 3 inch use of an image in Time, but a use of an image which I cared about, which I knew as I shot it would be used one day as a good stock image (photograph of Japanese nationalism/ patriotism, Tokyo). These are the good ones. Or, as I found this one below, a decent spread which I hadn’t seen for a long time, I’ve no scan of it, no pdf, I’d forgotten what it looked like, and happy to be reunited, it was a fun assignment, nice journalist. Ahh, the memories.

I’ve often wondered how other photographers keep their tear sheets ? Pdfs ? Boxes of cuttings, everything ? or just the big spreads, the good spreads?  Let me know, I’m curious.

But why do I keep them all anyway, all these pdf’s and cuttings ? Why ? I like to see the fruits of my labour. I like to think that in years to come I can sift through them all and reminisce over a career and life well spent. In my dreams I like to think that a book editor at Aperture will be laying out a large monograph of my work and will need these for the introductory essay pages. Or the curator at MOMA will need some of them to put under glass on tables for the exhibition visitors to see. Or, perhaps, just for grandkids to look at one day. But will they care ? Will, years from now, they still just be pixels getting corrupted, papers and magazines growing old in the corner instead of wrapping someone’s fish supper?