2 Rework old images to tell new stories

Dave Kai Piper shows how ‘upcycling’ old digital photos from your archive can lead to completely new projects, made without leaving your home

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have hundreds, if not thousands of images, on your hard drives, yet will think little of them. Do photographers have to create new photographs to make new images, or can we find new ways to reimagine or repurpose images in our archives? Could there some hidden gems among your archives, ready for a whole new lease of life?

As a long-form project, I have been photographing old houses in Ireland. Each day, I would head out with this goal in mind. I didn’t care about the weather or locations; in fact, I didn’t pay attention to much else aside from the building.

The context of the images was pre-established before I even set off for the day. I would set up my camera and my mental approach to creating a certain type of image. But did I also end up taking images of things I didn’t notice at the time?

Where possible, each building had one close-up image and one wide image. Could I return to that body of work and come up with a new brief? Could I create, for example, a new set of prints around a different narrative, using the same images? This could involve re-editing old images or going back through my archives and finding images that were unused in the project. Perhaps a short set of skylines could be cropped out?

Recently, I made a set of prints for a local display – it was a new body of work that was ‘upcycled’ from older images. Here’s what I did, and how it could work for you…

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Computer and your image-editing software of choice Printer Photo frame

Time: Two or three hours