Góði hirðirinn

From a Poor Image to the Spark of a Project

I’ve been visiting a second-hand store for months. At first I went occasionally, wandering through the aisles, looking at old objects, and taking photos with my phone of certain items to train an AI model I’ve been working on. I rarely bought anything. I was just observing.

But those occasional visits slowly, almost without noticing, turned into daily visits.And all because of one photo.An absurd, poor, technically bad photo.A photo that unlocked something in my head.

What is Góði hirðirinn?

Góði hirðirinn (The Good Shepherd) is a massive second-hand shop. Every time you walk in, you get that feeling that you’re about to find a treasure and you actually might. I’m not exaggerating: people line up one hour before opening. And when the doors open, all modern civility disappears. People run, push each other, and fight to be the first to grab those treasures.

Inside, it looks chaotic, but it’s organized by departments. The first thing you see is furniture; to the left, used clothing. Further in, toys. And then you reach the biggest section: household items: glasses, plates, cutlery, kitchen utensils, tablecloths, and countless objects that don’t fit into any clear category. In that store you can find everything someone once considered useful, but also objects that never had a practical purpose and yet carried emotional value. Among those things you find photos, drawings, postcards, framed pictures. Small fragments of life that once mattered to someone. Now sitting there, waiting for a second chance.

The Photo That Shouldn’t Exist

The image that changed everything was postcard-sized, shot with a 35mm camera, probably a disposable. Developed in a quick lab, the type where you come back days later with a mix of excitement and dread because you have no idea what turned out well and what didn’t.

Technically speaking, the photo is a disaster.Badly framed, slightly out of focus, underexposed. A poor image, the kind that normally gets thrown away without hesitation.

And yet, it wasn’t thrown away, it was framed and that alone says a lot.

The picture shows the inside of a house, probably the living room. Based on the low angle, it was likely taken from a sofa. On the right you see an open door, then a blank stretch of wall, and on that wall the projection of some animated cartoons.

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to imagine a child took it. Or, stretching it a bit, an adult who pressed the shutter by accident. But the important question isn’t who took it , it’s this: How does a photo this bad end up framed and hanging in someone’s home?

Found photograph, 35mm, technically flawed. Its value isn’t in the quality, but in the fact that someone chose to frame it. That gesture triggered everything I describe in this text.

That’s where everything lit up.

From a Worthless Photo to a Creative Process.

That one image triggered something I wasn’t searching for. Since that day, I go back to the store almost every day. I’m not looking for valuable objects, I’m looking for emotional evidence. Photos, postcards, drawings… anything that proves something mattered to someone at some point.

Right now, I have around twenty images. They don’t relate to each other, they have no clear narrative, no thread connecting them. They’re objects rescued from oblivion, things that ended up in the trash for reasons I’ll never know, now sitting in second-hand boxes waiting for a new reading.

And the truth is, I have no idea what I’m doing with them.I don’t have a title.I don’t know if this is a project or just a collection of impulses. The only thing I do have is a strong feeling that, at some point, something will click. Something will give them meaning. I’m almost waiting for one image to appear that acts like a hinge and connects all the others.

“Right now I don’t see any meaning in what I’m collecting, but I feel the meaning will show up later.”

And contradictory as it sounds, that’s enough for me to keep going.

When Inspiration Shows Up Where It Shouldn’t.

The point of this story isn’t to confess a new obsession with second-hand shops. The point is something bigger: the unexpected interferences that spark a creative process.

For many years I thought that to start a project you needed a big idea, a groundbreaking theme, something crystal clear, a strong concept, a precise direction. And that’s false. It’s the same myth as thinking a better camera will automatically make you a better photographer.

Many times a project is born from an accident. From a discovery. From a bad photo that should not have survived.

“To begin a project you don’t always need a great idea; sometimes all you need is a spark.”

And that spark doesn’t need to make sense at the beginning.Sometimes the reason a project exists only becomes clear much later.

So, What Am I Doing?

I don’t know and I don’t think I need to know yet.

I’m following an impulse. I’m letting myself be guided by an intuition: the one that pushes me to search for emotional traces in objects that stopped mattering to someone else. And for me, that’s already a legitimate way to begin something.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that real projects don’t always come from clarity. Many of them come from chaos. From a store full of abandoned things. From a bad photo in a cheap frame. From a question you weren’t expecting and that doesn’t need an immediate answer.

That’s how creative interferences work: they don’t ask for permission, they don’t show up when you want them to, and they never come with instructions.

But when they appear, you explore them and you follow them.