Anyone building a portfolio of any kind will be familiar with the phrase, “kill your darlings.” This summer, I dug through the archives and started to collate a photographic portfolio of the last four years of photographing law school life, and found myself vividly reintroduced to this heartbreaking admonition. Wisdom, they say, comes suddenly.

I shoot, on average, around eight to ten thousand images a year at school. Of that, about twenty percent are goodish. Five percent are really good, and only one to two percent are proper bangers. Multiply that by four years and, oh boy… You do the math.

Although the idea for a book about school life had been percolating for some time, I couldn’t settle on the right thrust for it and instead ended up futzing with elaborate layout ideas. Deciding on a portfolio instead galvanized this process and brought much-needed clarity to the project. The hard part of portfolio work is not what to include; it’s what you leave out. After whittling my archive down to a mere 275 images, I told myself firmly that I needed to pick the best 40, found that impossible and ended up with 57.

I surprised myself with the image selection throughout the “kill your darlings” process. It was both easier and harder than expected, and when you finally see the pages laid out, it is a lot easier than you may think to carve. I think my favorite part was the departure from the usual process, which involves navigating the marketing needs, political beefs, social currency of each image and, instead, selecting a series based on how each image found its way into the collection purely on its own merits. Sacred cows, it seems, make the best hamburger.

The finished PDF is at the printers (yes, I wanted a hard copy), but you can scroll through the pages (in order) above. Both facing pages are visible on each slide, as you would view the pages in the book.