Editing and killing your darlings

Written By Mattia Compagnucci

Editing and sequencing, especially when you want to tell a story through photos, is hard. And heartbreaking at times.

I’m going through one of the final edits of the first issue of “Wandering Through Life”, a magazine dedicated to the places, lives, and stories I wander through. It will be the physical companion to this digital journal that will be released once in a while.

This first edition is dedicated to my trip to Istanbul with The Raw Society during their storytelling workshop. I’m super excited about how it’s coming out. It contains around 65 photos and 4 essays, and it was—and still is—a process of dealing with memories, feelings, and letting go of some of them.

Letting go is not something that comes naturally to me. I’ve already moved from a 40-page magazine without any writing to a 96-page one with 4 essays. And still, the story is shaping.

Last week, I was going through the latest version with Jorge, one of the two photographers running The Raw Society, and I was struggling to decide what to leave out. There were a few photos I really liked and wanted to share that weren’t really fitting.

From our conversation, I took away a guideline for these kinds of decisions. I just ask myself:

Is this photo/writing serving the story and the message I want to communicate?
Will the experience of the person who will flip through the pages be enriched if I include it?

That worked. After the call, I completely restructured one section with clear intention. Because, in the end, there should be an intention behind everything we put out there.

It’s still hard for me to press that delete button and let one of my darlings go, but now I do it a bit more lightheartedly. I’m sure those photographs will have their own life, but for now, they have to stay on my hard drive, on social media, or, like some of them, in this piece.

 

✽

 
Mattia Compagnucci
Previous

What a weekend in Porto taught me
Next

Taking snapshots of life