The Undiscovered Archive

Most of what feels like old work to you is brand new to everyone else.

Recently, a photographer friend of mine posted online about how he and a musician were talking about how they feel like they fell into a trap of needing to promote their latest work which causes them to ignore their best work. That’s something that I feel too.

How many of you have seen this photo that ran in the now defunct Sea Kayaker Magazine? It’s the first three-star photo in my catalog of over 230,000 digital images. It’s from June 2004. I have 1000s of images like this that saw the light of day over a decade ago and haven’t resurfaced anywhere.

The interesting thing to me is that most of what we feel is “old work” is actually undiscovered work to most people.

It isn’t just older images; new images fall into the same pattern as well. I took this photo of hummocked ice near Grand Marais last winter. I love the image and think it’s one of my favorite from 2026, but it’s now buried under five months of other images. Looking at the statistics on social media very few of the people who follow my work even saw it. I have over two decades of work that fit this pattern, and that’s not including all my old slides! There have to be one or two good photos in those slide archives.

It isn’t just my work. I follow a lot of photographers, and I’ve noticed the same pattern. I seldom see their latest work let alone their older work. The only one that I happen to catch often is Bruce Percy, who happens to share his latest works via newsletter, and he’s able to do that because he seemingly works in low volumes of images.

Your audience, your family, your friends likely never saw the photo when you first posted it, or maybe you never shared it at all. This isn’t just a social media problem. Art critics, such as Harold Rosenberg, have argued that the art world often reaches towards novelty at the expense of archive.

I’ve even forgotten about my archive. Take the following photo as an example. I shot it back in 2007. I was on a bike tour from Duluth, Minnesota to Dubuque, Iowa. I shot this somewhere along the bluff near the Mississippi River in Iowa. Not only do I like it because I remember the trip, but I also like it because of the misty morning, the gravel road and how the hills in the background fade away. I shared it in a newsletter and on a blog that doesn’t exist anymore.

Forgetting about my own images, even ones that I loved, makes me want to dig into my archives and resurface a few now and then. An archive isn’t just a bunch of old reruns. It’s a way to add new introductions, not only to current work, but to what that current work was built on.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this essay, and I’ll see you again next week. If you happen to visit Grand Marais this summer, I just dropped off a bunch of new greeting cards at the North House Folk School. Most of them are older images.

For the parting image, here’s a new image from last Thursday night.