Parabo

Parabo, pronouced (I hope) like 'Haribo', is a service that lets you print stuff. For the past few years I've used it to print my 25 favourite pictures from the year. It affords me the opportunity to review the year through the prism of the photos I took; it also forces me to make the hard decisions of which ones to keep. I try to balance different things: significant events, people I spent time with, things I did, places I went—not to mention including actually good pictures, which aren't abundent and don't tend to overlap much with the other things! I like to take some time on it because, almost inevitably, those photos become the year in question for me.

Looking up at my wall now, I can see the moments I chose to remember from 2015: when I played at Jon and Lindsay's wedding, when Dom and I went to the Imperial War Museum, when Martyn and I livestreamed our hunt for Yanis Varoufakis outside the Brighton Centre, the last ever I Am Arcade, when I saw the Mountain Goats at Komedia, when I went to Bristol to see Scott and co. screen their comedy pilot, when I did a talk at Measurefest... That set of pictures has, through repeat exposure, become my canonical set of 2015 memories. Unless I decide to go back through my entire photo archive or read back through my diary (if I was keeping one at the time), that's what 2015 is to me.

I'm having a hard time doing it for this year, at least in part because this year has been an extremely full one. In terms of going places and doing things, putting on and taking part I think it's probably my most eventful to date. There are also massive behind-the-scenes changes that can't really be demonstrated in pictures but I still want to try and include somehow. I've taken several runs at it but I keep getting halfway through the year and running out of slots. 25 little windows into the past—what was really important?