For the first time in my life I’ve decided to show my photographs to the non-online public. For years now I’ve had them on display online but now I feel it’s time to go offline as well.

It’s been a long process of preparing myself to do this. For some reason I find it so much more intimidating to actually put my images up on display in a public place where people have no choice but to look at them. When showing them on my website people have to actively go to my website with the purpose of looking at my images. Here they come for a totally different reason — to hang out, drink coffee and have a good time. And then my images are hanging there for them to stare at. I really feel I’m crossing a sphere here … I know it’s just my stupid brain playing with me, and that (hopefully) they actually don’t mind, or simply look the other way.

And still, this was the biggest issue for me not to do this.

Eventually reason kicks in

And thank God it did. So I embarked on a journey I told myself — after overcoming the obstacle mentioned above — would be a walk in the park. I was very wrong!
Now all I had to do was selecting which images I wanted on display, and finding venues.
The latter of the two soon proved to be the easiest of them — I’d envisioned it differently …

Narrowing 50.000+ images into 20

I thought I knew exactly what images to show. But as I started roaming through my ever growing catalogue of images, I soon realized that picking only 15-20 would be anything but easy.

Part of that process took a couple of days. Skimming through my images, selecting candidates for the show. So pretty quickly I had it narrowed down to about a hundred images. From there the process slowed dramatically.

Kill your darlings

Someone wisely said once. But what darlings? I knew that the first couple of venues had limited space to fill (more on that later), so I simply had to be better at picking the best of the best. So I started considering a “theme”. I had one right away: Abandoned — I have a lot of that and that is a big passion of mine. But I would also like to show my variety as a photographer, so I chose to go with my gut feeling. My selection of the “créme de la créme”.

So I ended up with a selection of images best showing my variety … and yet still I’ll bet you can see me in every image. Not actually see me, but see me — the “artist”.

Venues … and how to find them

I was convinced that finding venues would be difficult. Had it been 10-15 years ago, it probably would. But in a world of social networks this one was actually a walk in the park. I simply asked around on Facebook and Twitter … and boom … suddenly I was booked several places for the next 6 months.

I had been thinking about going around to cafés, libraries and maybe some art galleries asking if I could display my images. I might have to do that later. But for now I’m good :D