Reject the First

This weekend, amongst various other chores, I’ve been transferring my old photographs from the ancient sticky back/clear front albums they’ve been in since the early 1980s. The quality of most of the pictures is, to say the least, variable. That’s partially because I was only nine or 10 when most of the photos were taken, and partially because of the frankly rubbish Instamatic camera I was using back then. However, until I reached the end of the second album, I kept everything because, despite the lack of aesthetic memory, they’re valuable records of my past.

After that, I discovered handful of picture which just had no redeeming virtues at all. Or, at least, they made no sense in an album context. So, I pulled them out, dumped them on my desk and carried on.

Looking at them again, they do have a redeeming value after all. Looked at in isolation, detached from the rest of the album they have a strange abstract charm, that I could have some fun with. So, *One Man & His Blog*****proudly presents the Reject Series: photographs that didn’t make the replacement album cut.

The rules are simple:

1. The photo is scanned and then destroyed.
2. The photo can be modified in Photoshop as much as I like.
3. The results will be posted here, and then to Flickr.

The first picture, which you can see above, was part of a set taken at my first day at a new school, Dollar Academy. There are pictures of kids on my street in their new uniforms and this, disastrous, picture of me taken by one of my contemporaries, I guess. That’s the regulation school hymn book in my pocket. As part of an album, it’s a dismal failure. As a photo in its own right I find it rather intriguing.