I have a messy desk, and it doesn’t take long for the desktop in my computer to be cluttered with all sorts of stuff too. Over the years I’ve been very lax and haven’t catalogued my negatives or prints in any coherent way.
I never did.
I’ve got lots of negatives in glassine and non buffered envelopes, prints too. I’ve got those archival shoe boxes you can get from library supply houses, like Gaylord Brothers, and I’ve got those print file sheets.
Most of all I just have piles of prints and paper negatives / “stuff”, and my print file sheets are in stacks as well. The images in the shoe boxes are all labeled, but the information on the envelope doesn’t say exactly what is inside, there might be other negatives or prints that seemed similar enough they could co-habitate.
For many years I shot lots and lots of 35mm film, 120 and 4x5film. It was all I could do to keep my sanity when my kids were younger and I was living the dream. When I wasn’t I was making photographs. Riding shotgun I always had a camera, and I used to develop 5 or 10 rolls of film a day sometimes more. I’d figure out a way to develop them without being present. I started experimenting with stand development that only took 30 mins, couldn’t be longer I’d either get distracted and forget about it, or I’d miss my only opportunity and they’d have to develop for 6 hours. My time was limited
then hang them sleeve them and scan them. and if I had sun prints or hand colored cyanotypes I’d scan them too.
All the scans go by year, except for the ones that don’t. Inside the year folder are months, and inside the months are all the scans. They are negative scans, as well as everything else that I prepared to print.
The file names for all my scans usually is some random information. These scans and inversions might have names that somehow came to me as I was working on them, but escape me years later. The print vue sheets are un-housed and in piles on my darkroom counter and before they are there in cold storage they are around my Lightroom.
Since I had kids I did my best to weed out whatever chemistry I could. I’d use coffee as a developer, I’d make cyanotypes. Sometimes I’d develop things, sometimes I didn’t. The paper, glass and metal prints made as far back as 1986 sit vertical against furniture, or are stored in drawers from a cheep sawdust board snap together end table purchased at an affordable furniture store. ( no space for a flat file )
There are problems with organized disorganization. One problem is that if you may have vague memories of what things are called, false memories of when they were taken and where they might be, and it might all be a blur. The great thing is that because you are lost at sea, you can excavate. you might find something else to distract you and reinterpret or an old friend. sometimes I figure out why I did what I did when I was in the zone.
