One of the more tedious aspects of having been a photographer for nearly 20 years (not all of them as a professional, of course) is the lack of organization that plagued my work early on — particularly when it came to shooting on film. Recently, I’ve been going through old negatives and film scans in an effort to get my analog archive organized. In the process, I’ve stumbled across some of my earlier film scans from nearly a decade ago, when I was just starting to learn how to shoot on 35mm film (much thanks to Ansel Adam’s brilliant Zone System!) as well as how to process film and make prints in the darkroom.
One of the joys of film photography, for me at least, is the fact that film seems to freeze history and moments in time in a way that feels so much more real, and so much more permanent, than digital. Stumbling upon photos from adventures with old boyfriends, or discovering one of the first contact sheets you printed in the darkroom as a college student, is a genuinely unique experience — those memories feel as if they’re almost memorialized in a way no photo taken with a smartphone, or even a DSLR, can ever quite replicate.
Having worked digitally almost exclusively since graduating from college with my B.F.A. nearly a decade ago, I’d almost forgotten how special film photography is until recently — and how much I value it as a medium for both creative expression and journalistic documentation. In the coming months, I’ll be working more with film as part of my recent promise to myself to get back to doing more photography again after somewhat casting it aside while writing my way through the pandemic years.