You have 1000 images. Now what.

Hi fam,

First off all, have you registered for my FREE workshop yet? Get hired for work you love, how to build a personal project that pops! If not, you can register here. it’s free.

ok, let’s go:

The first time I ran a workshop at with NATIVE, I walked into a room with photographers who had been working on their projects for months. Some of them, years.

We spread their images across the floor. Every-single-one. We're talking 1000, sometimes more. Contact sheets. Prints. Loose photos overlapping each other, corner to corner, end to end.

It looked like chaos. Because it was. A beautiful chaos.

People got quiet. Some got anxious. A few wanted to start curating immediately, pulling images, organizing, making it “neat” — forcing some sort of light. Trying to make sense of it all, prematurely. That impulse to control the mess is so deeply human. It’s the path of least resistance.

I asked everyone to sit down and just look. Not edit. Not decide. Just look. I also asked them to breathe, to slow down the process of controlling. Of wanting to fill the space with words, with explanations. I asked them to witness each other’s work for a bit.

We did this for days.

Eventually, as we slowed down, something would happen. As we started asking questions, the images would start “talking”. Not metaphorically. You'd begin to feel the rhythm between them. Themes started to come to the surface. A photograph of stillness would call to one of movement a meter away. Two images with completely different subjects would share the same emotional register, the same weight in the lower third. You'd start to feel where the eye rests and where it runs.

The story would basically “allow itself to be told”. Through us. We were the channels.

What I've always believed is that editing is a relationship. A dance with narrative, with what it is exactly that you want to tell. A dance with aesthetics, with ebbs and flows, with cycles. With the images, yes — but really with yourself. Your eye gets trained differently when you print. The screen flattens everything, the light, the texture, the scale, the colors, the silence between the frames. But on paper, oh man! a quiet image stays quiet. An image with tension feels as if it’s holding tension in your hands. It feels heavier.

Sigh. Call me an abuelita but, there's nothing like editing IRL.

We'd spend a week building what I can only describe as a dance (if you know me, you’d know why I call this a dance 🙂 ). Thinking about pace: which images slow you down, which ones propel you forward. Rhythm: where does the sequence breathe, where does it accelerate. Aesthetic cohesion: not sameness, but a visual logic that holds. Levels of narrative: what's information, what's feeling, what's cosmology. Negative space: not just within the frame, but between images, how the white on the floor between two prints is part of the composition too.

And by the end of the week, we didn't have 1000 images. We had 30. Sometimes 20. The ones that were doing actual work.

Editing, at the end of the day is not so much about a beauty contest, but rather about choosing what serves the story. What serves the whole.

Knowing how to shoot is one skill. Knowing how to build a story with what you've shot, man, that's what makes you an artist. That's what gets you funded, published, hired and FULFILLED.

Reminder: On March 6 at noon EST, I'm hosting a FREE workshop: Get Hired for Work You Love.

We'll touch on narrative, how to think about your editing, your sequencing, the story you're building and why it matters to the people who commission and publish work.

Come ready to think differently about your images.

As always, you can email me back with any insights, comments, feedback, hopes and dreams.

With love, Lola