A few years back I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my work. I had put so much of myself and time into working at the paper telling other peoples stories that I didn't really have time for my own work. I was a painter and I thought I needed to do more of that. I set up in my basement but it wasn't really working out well. As I was looking through old boxes of photographs looking for some sort of reference I found some old slides and got out a projector and began projecting the photographs on the basement walls. The photographs now had a different texture and they looked different--they looked interesting. I began photographing these projections. I projected negatives and photographed them with negative film which gave me a sort of slide. This led to holding up negatives to lights and rephotographing them with a Micro lens(each time the image changed and seemed to read differently--interesting!) This led to holding up prints to a bulb and letting the intensity of the 300 bulb glow thru them and I photographed that. I then spent a couple years going down into my basement with box after box of film to see what I could make. Now I have a lot of old boxes of photographs and negatives that are getting moldy and, well deteriorating. So I began photographing this(Do you see a pattern here--I find many things interesting enough to photograph them.) Recently I felt like this has sort of run its course as I find myself just being attracted to the same images over and over again. And I want to clean up and organize and get rid of old images that I don't need to store or move again. I figured I'd document as many as I thought I should before tossing them away(I might actually burn them and--yep--you guessed it photograph that!) So today I began this process of organizing and saving--and tossing images. One thing I noticed was that I've taken hundreds of portraits over the years. I hadn't really thought about it much, but back in the days when I did nothing but photograph with my FM2 and Tri-X film I made probably a couple hundred portraits of people around me. Occasionally I'd take one or two of these and try some alternative process to make the image something different. Some of these worked--some didn't. And un-like my mood lately to get rid of stuff, I saved everything--the good the bad and the ugly and would try to use all of it in making other work. I gathered a handful of the portraits I re-found today for todays featured picture. I even included a self portrait. Its fun to look back at how we once approached subject matter--sometimes I feel I had something more to say back then, but then realize that it wasn't that I had more--it was it was all new so each time I did something it was really naive excitement--I mean that in a good way--but now the excitement comes from being able over-come the mundane of work that isn't 'new' any longer and still finding something really special within it and make the best images I can. Photographs by Richard Sayer--from his old shoeboxes in the basement.