Looking back on 20+ years of photography

Sunday 23 January 2022, 14:41 by Yljas Roeper | 4,208 views | 3 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

What do you do with old photos? Or your photos in general? Do you ever look back at them? Or do you make something, post it, and then let it disappear into the oblivion of your digital archive?

I started a project two years ago, thinking it would last a year. As it turns out, I am barely halfway through it.

Always looking for new projects, at the end of 2019 I realised that I had been taking photographs for almost 20 years. What started as a hobby quickly grew into a business alongside a regular job.

A few years later, circumstances forced me to let go of the business activities, but the hobby remained. 20+ years of photography. I wanted to do something with that.

I came up with the 'Throwback Project' and decided to post a photo from the past 20 years on my Facebook page Ytos Photography every Tuesday and Thursday at 20:30.

Being organised, I then moved these to a specific album, so that the series would stay together.

I chose Tuesday and Thursday because of the alliteration: Throwback Tuesday and Throwback Thursday. Because I have various followers from abroad, I have been writing my posts in English for years anyway, so this choice seemed perfectly logical to me.

The aim of the project is to show my followers how I have progressed over those 20 years. Besides having many more followers on Facebook than on Instagram, Facebook also offers a scheduling tool, allowing me to prepare photos with captions up to three months in advance.

Instagram is now part of Facebook (Meta), and you can now use the same scheduling tool for Instagram as well.

The scheduling tool for Facebook and Instagram
On Thursday 2 January 2020, I posted my first photo. Nothing special, but an analogue photo of an old Dutch NZH bus in Agadir, Morocco. The photo was taken with a Pentax PC35AF, which I still have, by the way, but that's beside the point.

In the caption, I explained what could be seen, why I was posting the photo and what people could expect from me in this project in 2020. At that point, I still thought that the approximately 100 photos I could post that year would cover 20 years of photography. But things turned out differently.

The first photo from my new project
It is now 2022. The first photos for this year have been posted and scheduled. They are photos from 2009. Whereas I first thought I would be finished in a year, it now looks as though I might need four or five years to present 20 years of photography.

To be honest, I was not entirely consistent in 2020 and did not post anything for a few months. But the project is also taking longer than planned because I sometimes want to show too many photos.

An impression of my first years as a photographer
What makes this particular 'Throwback Project' even more enjoyable is not just seeing the progress I have made myself. If you ever look through an old family album, you will know what I mean. Looking at old photos is simply enjoyable because of the memories they bring back.

The memories this project brings back for me include the cameras I used. Or collaborations with photographers, models and, of course, MUAs. Special locations where I shot also come to mind.

Then there is organising model days and workshops and, also quite amusingly, what things were like at, for example, the first ZOOM Experience.

I find it surprisingly how much I still remember. And it is not just me. Judging by the responses, various followers I have worked with in the past remember a lot too.

If you still have all your photos from your early days and have an hour to spare, I can recommend looking back at what you once created.

You will find that it really is enjoyable. And who knows, perhaps you will start a project like this too, which I have now been working on for several years.

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