There’s something quietly relentless about going through an archive of one’s own work. Not the glamorous part of photography. Not the travel, not the moment of capture, not even the finished image. Just me, a screen, and tens of thousands of files staring back, asking to be judged, thrown away or tweaked.

I’m currently working my way through roughly 40,000 RAW images. It’s slow, methodical, and at times tedious. Frame by frame, deciding what stays, what goes, and what might have been overlooked the first time around. There’s no shortcut. I just sit with it.

But somewhere in this repetitiveness, something else happens.

I start to see some images differently.

Images I archived years ago suddenly open up again. A slight change in composition makes what felt off before now feels deliberate. A moment that seemed ordinary now carries weight. And with the tools I have today in Lightroom and Photoshop, there’s also the possibility of giving certain photographs a second life. Not by reinventing them, but by adjusting them – closer to what I actually felt, at the time.

Getting rid of the duds is also part of the process. It clears space, both literally and mentally. It sharpens the overall body of work. I’m not just editing images – I’m editing my own history.

And then there’s the unexpected part: memory.

Going through these files is like reopening doors in my head that I forgot existed. Trips, assignments, places, people. Details come back in fragments – the light, the temperature, the pace of a city, the reason I stopped to take that particular shot.

It’s not nostalgia exactly. More like reconnecting with earlier versions of how I saw the world.

This image is from Venice, shot during an assignment in 2009. It shows the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, sitting quietly across the water from the more crowded parts of the city. There’s a kind of restraint to it – the clean geometry, the pale façade against the deeper tones of brick, the vertical pull of the bell tower cutting into an otherwise calm sky.

Venice often gets reduced to chaos and crowds, but moments like this reveal something else entirely. Space. Balance. A sense of stillness that exists just outside the obvious.

At the time, it was one of many captures. Today, it carries more context. More clarity. Not because the scene has changed, but because I have.

That’s the strange reward in all this. What starts as a cleanup becomes something else entirely – a recalibration. A reminder of where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and how my eye has evolved along the way.