When my wife and I got married, we combined two lives that had already run a good bit of their course, which included 3 children each and a couple of households worth of stuff. Fourteen years later, we are still sifting through things. This process has been made much more difficult by our having absorbed at least three other households worth of stuff, and a mutual tendency to see future potential in just about everything we put our hands on.

Some years ago I bought The Dam Book by Peter Krogh. I thought I could kill two birds with the proverbial single stone by first getting my feral photo catalogue under some sort of control (a bit like a Bengal tiger, really, in that how much can you really trust the beast within to not return and eat you alive?) and then apply lessons learned to my physical belongings. As of today, both birds remain blessedly free.

Dave Mullen once pointed out that should our children ever deign to sift through our photos after we are gone, they would be completely uninterested in the landscapes, still-lifes, etc. therein, and would only want to see pictures of people. I would add, a very specific subset of people: our family, when we were all a lot younger. Maybe a few of their grandparents.

My father would periodically declare a slide night, almost always a Sunday, and my parents and us six kids would squeeze into the living room where he had set up the screen and the projector which accepted rectangular cartridges of slides, a fair number of which were, despite numerous corrections, stubbornly upside-down. Some of the earlier sets were dutifully catalogued, while later ones were more of a mélange. We'd seen every photo before, but it remained a treat to see ourselves, or more accurately, our former selves, up there on the screen, slightly askew, in poor light, a green tint in our pale faces.

The set was limited, and therein lay at least part of the magic. Each cartridge held just 36 slides, and there were only so many cartridges he could fit on his tiny bookshelf. The percentage of slides without people was likely in the low single digits, and they remain, in my memory, as low points in the review.

Several weeks ago I went to a horse show. I'd never been to one before and I set my camera to Ch on the shutter release in order to try and catch a few good moments when the horses, egged on to defy good common horse sense by their riders, jumped over obstacles while carrying 150 pounds on their backs. I came home with 568 photos.

At some point, maybe four or five years ago, someone said to me, "Why delete? Hard drives are cheap," and this was like waving an open bottle of Captain Morgan under the nose of a rummy. I have an 8TB external drive, two 3TB externals, a 6TB network drive and a 2 TB travel drive. They contain thousands of images which, by any measure at all, deserve to be deleted. Except, you know, you never know when you might need an image of an out-of-focus houseplant.

This is why you will see sets of 12, 24 and 36 on this website. I've begun to see the process as similar to crafting poetry, by trying to omit anything that is unnecessary. I'm new to this, and still have a lot to accomplish, but here's the lesson I take from all of this: identify what you value most, and pare down the rest. In the months ahead, and throughout 2025, this is my goal, and I think I will skip the photographs.