Bryan O’Brien: This will be the year I put order on the chaos of my photo archive

I’ve been a photographer for a long time and have a large amount of negatives, slides, prints in boxes and drawers, digital files on all sorts of discs and drives.
Every year, as evenings get shorter I commit to putting order on the chaos of what I ambitiously call my “photo archive”. At the back of my mind is an aspiration to show 40 years of work in some cohesive form; a book, an exhibition, whatever.
My efforts start well but by the time the central heating goes back on, usually early October, I’ve lost interest and before you know it, another year has gone by.
I’ve trying again this year and am sharing this news with the hope that friends and colleagues will guilt me into staying on the wagon.
Some envelopes of film negatives have a contact sheet attached. This print is made by laying negatives on a photosensitive paper, exposing it to light and the chemical process. The most common is a six-by-six reflecting the contents of a 36-exposure roll of film.
Most photographers of my generation who work in daily journalism have made very few contact sheets, even when shooting film. There simply wasn’t the time. When you shot film you processed the strip of negs, dried it and then held it up to the light or ran it through an enlarger, selecting the few frames to make prints from.
The image of the photographer sipping coffee while perusing a contact sheet with magnifying loupe looks great in movies but was a rarity for me in the era in which I worked. That said, I have made a number of contact sheets, many in college and some for personal projects where quick turnaround wasn’t an issue.
While a single image might capture the essence of a story, the contact sheet shows the context and sequence of events before and after the chosen image. It gives a sense of what the photographer was thinking when making the photos as you see them change location and so on. It shows the duds, the underexposed and the pit of focus, the imperfections. When you revisit them after many years you see details you missed first time round and make a different selection from back then.