Why I Still Print Photos

Last weekend I printed thirty photographs. Hung them on a long white wall in my apartment with small magnets. Stood back.

Something happened that has not happened in a long time. I looked at them for a full hour.

The screen problem

The same photos, on a 27-inch display, get exactly eleven seconds of my attention. Maybe eight. I swipe through them, see the rough shape of each, mentally file them, and reach for the next thing. This is not really looking. It is recognition.

Print forces a different kind of seeing. A printed photo is large, slow, and physical. You cannot scroll past it. You have to physically stand in front of it, and the act of standing changes what you see. I noticed things on paper I had not seen on screen — a slight blur in the corner of a portrait, a half-shut eye in the background, the way one photo was slightly overexposed in exactly the way that made it feel like summer.

A small ritual

Now I print more. Not everything — maybe one in twenty. The ones I print get a different life. They live on the wall for a few months, then go into a folder, then occasionally come out again on a quiet evening. The ones I do not print stay on the hard drive, in a folder I have not opened in two years.

Both kinds are real. But the printed ones are visited. The others are stored.

A test

If you have not printed in a while, try it. Pick your ten favorite photos from the last year. Print them. Hang them. Sit in front of them with coffee and look.

You will discover at least three of them are different photos than you thought.