A portfolio of outtakes (rejections) from an experimental or ongoing project. Outtakes can be good images in themselves, but they do not yet fit the conceptual underpinnings of a fully thoughtout exhibition, photobook or project.
An outtake is conventionally understood to be a portion of a work (usually a film or music recording that is removed in the editing process and not included in the work’s final, publicly released version). In the digital era, significant outtakes have been appended to CD and DVD reissues of many albums and films. In terms of photos, an outtake may also mean the ones which are not released in the original set of photos (i.e. photo shoots).
As an example the images in the first two rows below are outtakes from Gary Sauer-Thompson’s contribution to the 2019/20 Mallee Routes exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery in South Australia. That exhibition was structured around three themes: Absent History, Space/place and Unknown Futures and the images were of the South Australian and Victorian Mallee. The images in the 3rd row are by Adam Jan Dutkiewicz and they are outtakes from his Painting with Light project.
The concept of the outtake evolved into traces and elements of an emerging experimental project that was unrealised, buried or forgotten; or was a dead end, a detour, or lost.
Nostalgic Pleasures
The Nostalgic Pleasures project is about the outmoded and the anachronistic as it uses expired film and a long forgotten camera –a 1960s Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super (SLR). The project has a commitment to analogue technologies and their resistance to the pervasive influence of the digital, whilst its nostalgia entails actively remembering and preserving elements of a photographic culture that might otherwise be perceived as lost or forgotten.
