Caveat - Material + Second Guessing =

In learning to print my own color photographs, I've stumbled into (one kind of) new challenge. 

For the most part, I resist sharing my handmade silver-gelatin prints online, particularly the work that satisfies me, even more particularly the work the that satisfies me for long periods of time. I'm sure you know how rare creative satisfaction is for us as people making things in general.

I've made this (sometimes sub-)conscious decision in order to maintain a fresh excitement about sharing my own work when I participate in exhibitions or gallery shows or make books. It's hard to beat the gratuitousness of being able to look at an image a thousand times a week with a computer or phone in any city at any time of the day. 

But many of these black-and-white prints, honestly, I keep hidden in boxes where no one but me sees them until I've very actively decided to matte and frame them (usually as a gift). And I very rarely look at them during the in-between times. Therefore, they don't lose their luster. And not all of the color scans (90% of everything I've ever shared online) are luster-less to me now -- hardly; but they set off a different palpitation, ignite a different growth. 

With no response to the work I keep private, how will it change? Will it change? Does having a "public" viewership shoo the work in a specific direction, even if it's all in my mind? (I get that it's all in my mind.) And more importantly, how is my eye adjusting when I see the work translated into pixels and a different dimension? What blanks are my eyes filling that, if I were being objective, are not suffused with content? Or with different content? Am I accidentally pushing all my work toward cohesion? Specifically, I mean, do I resist pressing the shutter because I doubt the image will align with the gaggle of photographs I've already shared? What if I want to return to an image I've shot for ten years, what if the underlying goal is to push past it, but I resist because of an irrational sense of [Not only have I already shot this, I've already shared it and titled it and you too can see it at this link]?

These are larger questions about public sharing, and yeah, obviously I ask them of myself for more reasons than this.

But now, with the potential to print anything in the darkroom, I am shockingly trigger-shy to share film scans. 

They are so much less than what I can print. I hate to say it that way, and I don't mean to denigrate film scans. I actually adore the way scans look. Goodness, I've been living with them for the last ten years as if they were the sum of my creative proof, my existence as a maker.

That written, there is less material to them. There is less depth. There is less time put into making them. 

They represent so much less of my own hand.

I want WANT want to get back to sharing online, but I don't know how to bridge this new shyness, this fear.

I see a photograph, have something to connect it to, a narrative I don't want to forget, a question I want to ask here,
but as soon as I sit down to upload the scan into the little white box, I think, but what if, instead, I printed this next week?

(The major caveat to this, of course, is that it thus far takes me about two hours to make a decent print, and lab hours are extremely limited considering I have to also work around making a living at two jobs + university.)

* * *

I have no answer to this. You might have guessed. I'm here now because I want to document the texture of how I waver.

There are other issues on the table, aren't there always? For instance, the need to narrate myself has subsided.

But that's for another discussion, and I fear (fear? not precisely) that it can't be done here. At all.

Until then, two recent scans that I would like to print in the next few months but probably will not since the last ten years of shooting color negative film is firmly pressing my back with its two gigantic sweaty hands: