How Fifty People Became Fifteen Pictures
On editing Come Get Your Honey: why most of the work never made the book, and the pictures held back on purpose.
Nearly fifty people are behind Come Get Your Honey. Around fifteen portraits carried the finished series. People sometimes ask what happened to the rest, and the honest answer is that the edit was the hardest part of the work, and the most ethical part of it too.
When images choose each other
Early in the editing I noticed something that sounds mystical but is really just pattern recognition running ahead of intention: the images felt like they were choosing each other. A portrait would demand a certain photograph of the city next to it. A quiet frame would make a loud one impossible. Viviane Sassen has a related idea that has stayed with me, that a single picture can shape the aesthetic of an entire body of work. Once a few images had locked together, they set the temperature for everything else, and photographs I liked on their own simply had no place in that weather.
That is one reason fifty people became fifteen pictures. The other reason matters more.
The pictures I held back
Some of the people I photographed were not out to their families, or were out in one part of their life and not in another. A photograph can be a gift in one room and a danger in a different one.
So there are images I held back on purpose — strong images, images I would happily hang on a wall — because the person in them was still keeping part of themselves from people who might one day see the book. The series mixes visibility and anonymity deliberately: some collaborators wanted to be fully seen, some wanted to be present without being identifiable, and both choices shaped the edit as much as any formal decision did.
This is what consent looks like in practice. It is not a signature on a release form at the start. It is a series of decisions that continue long after the shutter, into the edit, into the book, into every exhibition since.
Against parachutes
There is a way of photographing communities that I think of as parachute work: arrive, extract the most dramatic frames, leave, publish. The pictures are often technically strong. The people in them rarely recognize themselves.
The slow edit is the opposite of that. When you spend years with people, you accumulate too many photographs, and the surplus forces you to ask, for every single frame, what it is for and who it serves. Fifty people, fifteen pictures. The gap between those numbers is not waste. It is the work.
Come Get Your Honey is published by Kehrer Verlag — the full series is here.