How I finally archived 20 years of my life's work — and why every photographer should

One of the moments that changed everything for me happened in 2001 at the Paramount Theatre in Denver. I was photographing Ray Charles on stage under really tight press restrictions, and I came away with an image that a lot of people responded to and told me was really strong. Hearing that gave me confidence in my work and helped me believe I could keep moving forward with photography as a career.

About 90% of what I’ve shot over the years has been music: live shows, studio sessions, backstage moments, and portraits of artists. Over the years, I kept running into the same problem: I couldn’t always find my own work when I needed it. I knew I had it, but it wasn’t easily accessible.

Dealing with my archive

For years, my physical archive — negatives, slides, and contact sheets — was stored away and difficult to access in a meaningful way. Some of it hadn’t been touched in 10 or even 20 years, going all the way back to when I made the switch from film to digital. I knew there were images in there I hadn’t seen in decades, and I knew it was important to preserve the material properly before more time passed.

I kept telling myself I’d get to it. But the truth is, a project like that is overwhelming to face alone.

One thing I’ve come to believe deeply is that if an image isn’t backed up in at least two places, it doesn’t really exist. Fire, damage, and loss are all risks, and I can’t take the chance of my life’s work disappearing.

Partnering with someone who understood my needs

I decided to work with Iron Mountain because of a relationship I already trusted — specifically with Andy Snyder, who’s a photographer himself. We have been friends for years, and when he described what their digital archiving process could actually do, it was a genuine “light bulb” moment for me. This was the solution I’d wanted for years without knowing it existed.

Since then, my negatives have been rehoused into archival-quality sleeves, and 14 boxes of material have been processed into 3,531 digital contact sheets. Iron Mountain also created a master document that allows me to review those contact sheets, along with a spreadsheet containing the metadata that was already written on the original slide and negative sheets.

But we’re really just at the beginning of the process. A lot more metadata still needs to be added, and right now we’re starting to go through the contact sheets and choose which individual images we want to have digitized at high resolution. Once we make those selections, we’ll provide Iron Mountain with a list of the images to scan.

Ultimately, the goal is to build an archive that is much easier to access, organize, search, and collaborate on with the people helping me curate the work.

This isn’t just nostalgia

Organizing my archive isn’t only about sentiment, even though there’s plenty of that involved. I’ve always believed that photography can have historical importance. Part of what has driven me to keep photographing and holding onto this work is the feeling that these images may matter beyond the moment they were made. They document artists, venues, communities, and moments in music that can’t be recreated.

As the archive becomes more fully cataloged and searchable, it will also allow me to respond much more quickly when a licensing request comes in, when an artist receives an award, or when the music world loses someone and people want to see them the way I saw them.

I also made a deliberate choice not to review this archive entirely on my own. I brought in an outside archivist to look at everything with fresh eyes. That process is already surfacing images I’d genuinely forgotten I shot and helping me see the work in a new way.

What’s next

Right now, we’re at the beginning of the curation process — going through thousands of contact sheets, identifying the images we want to digitize at high resolution, and beginning to build out the metadata that will eventually make the archive much more searchable and accessible.

One of the directions we’re actively exploring is a book drawn from my film-era music photography. Shot on Film is a working title for now, but going back through this archive is already reshaping how I see that body of work.

For me, this project is first and foremost about preserving the archive and making sure the work is organized, protected, and accessible for the future.

At the same time, one of the most exciting parts of the process is taking something I’ve been storing for such a long time, finally being able to go through it and edit it properly, and potentially create something new from it. Whether that becomes a book, an exhibition, or something else, the goal is to give the work another life while preserving the original archive for generations to come.

Not every image will make a book or exhibition, but every image still matters. Together they tell the story of a career, the artists I photographed, and an era of music photography created on film before digital took over.

If you are a photographer reading this, I’d encourage you to think about what’s sitting in your own boxes, drives, or cabinets. If you’re sitting on decades of work, ask yourself what’s actually in there and what it would mean to finally know.

Recently, I celebrated National Photography Day — a day about honoring images. For me, this now includes a lifetime of photographs and all of the possibilities that come with finally being able to see and access them again.

About Michael Weintrob

Michael Weintrob is an acclaimed Nashville-based photographer and the creator of Instrumenthead, his signature portrait series in which musicians are photographed with their instruments replacing their heads.

For more than three decades, Weintrob has photographed some of the most celebrated musicians in the world, capturing artists both on stage and in intimate portrait sessions. His work spans rock, jazz, blues, funk, Americana, bluegrass, and roots music and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally.

Weintrob is the author and photographer of the award-winning books Instrumenthead and Instrumenthead Revealed, which bring together hundreds of musicians and the stories behind their portraits. His distinctive work celebrates the relationship between musicians and the instruments that help define their sound.