One of the stranger parts of being a working photographer is that no matter how widely published or successful you are, the vast majority of your images are never seen by anyone else.
Take the Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen, for example. He can take hundreds of images to get just the one or two frames that best render the scene and fit the assignment. He figures that 99 percent of his pictures go unseen, and after a lengthy editing process the rest end up “under the bed.” He’s O.K. with that.
“It’s really in the editing of one’s work that one decides who one is as a photographer and really creates the storytelling,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Norway.
Though Mr. Bendiksen says editing is “a liquid process,” like most photographers he usually sticks with his original edit and moves forward to the next shoot. But he has found that when he looks back at work that he edited just a few years earlier, he often views the images very differently.
Now Mr. Bendiksen and many of his colleagues at Magnum have searched under their beds, in their closets and on their hard drives for once-orphaned photos that they now treasure — images that did not survive their original edit. The sometimes-surprising results of their rescue mission are now featured in the “Archive Dive Square Sale” on the cooperatively owned agency’s website. Signed 6-by-6-inch prints will be available through the online store for $100 each from this morning until 5 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 14.
![“Brazil is one of my favorite countries. In 1966, I did my very first story in color there. I have been fascinated by Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art with deep roots in the times of African enslavement and African warfare. Recently, as I was re-editing my many pictures from Brazil, I found this image taken in Salvador de Bahia.”](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141113191219im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/11/07/blogs/20141107-lens-magnum-2/20141107-lens-magnum-2-blog480.jpg)
Among the unexpected finds was a color image taken by Susan Meiselas while she was making her landmark black-and-white book “Carnival Strippers.” It even surprised Ms. Meiselas, who had completely forgotten that she had shot a few rolls of color film of tent exteriors in daylight. This was during the early 1970s, well before digital cameras that could make pictures by the flame of a single candle. At the time, Ms. Meiselas said, she could not have seriously considered making color images in the dimly lit tents.
Elliott Erwitt reached deep into his archives and came up with a photo of a window washer that he made in 1946, when he was 18 and still in high school.
Larry Towell chose a photo that did not make the final cut of his 10-year project on Mennonite communities in Canada and Mexico. His book, “The Mennonites,” included just 60 photos culled from thousands of images. He doesn’t remember why the photo did not make the final edit but said it was not uncommon for strong images to be sacrificed for the sake of the overall project.
“Photography is not just about seeing and taking pictures, it’s also about making sense of the photograph and making sense of it is what editing does,” he said. “You take a series of photographs, you tell a story with them and many pictures fall between the cracks in the process.”
Mr. Towell, who is also a poet and songwriter, says the editing process is often a matter of reduction. Less becomes more. He likens editing a photo story to writing a poem.
“You take out the adjectives and then you take out some of the unnecessary vocabulary,” he said. “You squeeze and squeeze the water out of the poem.”
Most photographers begin to make photos for the pure joy of capturing a successful individual image. When they start putting them together in a book, exhibit or slide show, it gives the opportunity to build richer narratives, but at the same time the primacy of the individual image is reduced in service of the greater good.
“When you’re editing you’re editing towards a certain end, and when that end is met you forget about the pictures that didn’t make it,” Mr. Towell said. “What this Magnum project has done is allowed us to go back and re-edit. There isn’t enough re-editing being done today.”
![“In 1962, I first visited New York. Later, looking at my contact sheets, I was surprised how many pictures had the American flag in the background. I realized the flag could be used as a link, showing visual and social changes in New York during my many future visits. This picture is taken in 2002. It is pertinent to me, a Brit, as in some way I feel it fits into the dubious tradition of the British risqué postcards. It has never been published, as the book it would appear in has yet to see completion.”](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141113191219im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/11/07/blogs/20141107-lens-magnum-1/20141107-lens-magnum-1-blog480.jpg)
Follow @MagnumPhotos, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.