When I moved out of the Bank in 2015, it coincided with my age and arthritis catching up with me. If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have gone for the extended warranty on parts.

Anyway, I lost about 27 steps going to first base, and it became too difficult to shoot the things I wanted to shoot, the way I wanted to shoot them.

Since I was always an obsessive person, I had to figure out something to do. 

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have Jeffrey Chong and Matt Dean working with me. They have lightened the load considerably. Here I was with 61 years of shooting, 45 of them with film and Matt figured out a way to scan my film into digital. 

This sounds simple today, but we had been trying using scanners, and it was a tough, slow, expensive unsatisfactory experience. Matt figured out that we could do the job by using a Nikon D810 with a Nikkor Macro 60mm lens. Since he’s started, we’ve done almost 14,000 images. We have now switched to a D850, and he’s even happier with that. 

I now spend my time looking at all the stuff I shot on film over the years. I enjoy immensely going back over all the work. I feel very lucky to be able to have the chance to edit all the work that I never had time to edit because I was always shooting.

What you will see on this website are collections of work that I shot from 1954 to 2000 in film.

Some of it was new to me. It was so long ago I was seeing it with a fresh eye.

I learned a lot about myself in the process, and the experience was joyous and humbling. Joyous when I found stuff I loved and humbling because there was so much crap.

I used to tell my classes when they raved about my work and compared it to theirs, “Believe me, I’ve taken more terrible images than all of you put together.” 

The trick is not to show them to people. 

I’ve got a sign over my desk that says, “Editing is next to Godliness.” The editing process itself is constantly changing. I find myself changing my standards and criteria for picking pictures. Someone said, “That causes a lack of consistency.” 

I remember the quote from Ralph Waldo Emmerson, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I’ll add more subjects to the website from time to time, and I hope some of you will let me know how you feel about the stuff. 

- Jay Maisel