I’m back in Norway after three years away. Heading to the island of Senja tomorrow for a week of photography with a group of workshop friends I know well.

I still have a portfolio of work created on the island of Senja from February 2020, just before all the lockdowns happened. But I have been deliberately leaving it aside for work on a later date. This is something I do more of now than I once did.

Years ago I would be so keen to work on new images the moment I got them back from the lab, but I’ve found there to be something extremely positive about keeping ‘something in the tank’ for later.

Of course, I’d like to think that this is a mature sign: to keep work back, or only work on it when I am ready to do so. But this all started in a way that I had not planned. Initially it was simply due to too many workshops and finding that when I had returned home, I needed space away from everything. I remember the first time I shelved some work for a few months, I grew anxious as that few months extended into 2 years. The collection of images were from the Isle of Harris in 2014, and I remember wondering if I would ever get round to them. My initial feelings were that if I left them more than several months, I would either forget about them, or the momentum would be lost.

Instead, when I finally did get round to working on them, it was the change in subject (I had been shooting a lot of Snow at the time) and distance that allowed me to look at the work in a very different way. And once I had completed work on them, I felt an overwhelming sense of ‘understanding’ and ‘calmness’ about my photography:

‘there is no rush, just work on the images when you feel you want to’,

seemed to be the message, and I have lived by this ever since.

If we look at musical groups as an analogy to this, many artists when they finish an album have loads of other songs that they wrote during the time of the production of the album, but they never completed them or recorded them. Sometimes artists have songs lying around from several albums ago, that finally make it onto their new album. Sometimes these songs are some of their best work, so it’s not indicative that the work was difficult or second rate. It’s just that perhaps the work didn’t suit what they were previously doing, or they just felt it wasn’t the right time.

The important bit is that being creative is not just about creating work, it’s also knowing when to shelve work that isn’t finished, and to give oneself permission to rework, re-edit, pause, or just shelve something indefinitely.

All work is fluid. The good artist knows this

I like having ‘something left in the tank’ - a few extra portfolios of images that I haven’t scanned yet or edited. I have the confidence now to know that the work isn’t shelved indefinitely, but that I will just choose as and when to edit the work.

I think space has become increasingly important to me.

I feel I need to be ready to work on things, and feel a sense of ‘this is the time’ to do it. Having the precedence of leaving work in the past for a while and getting round to working on it, has shown me that I can trust myself to work on it when I feel I am ready to.

But that’s just me. What about you?