Mamiyaroid 23.5
I recommend this Rachel Kushner essay, “The Hard Crowd”. It’s personal and includes a Woolworth’s photobooth photo of herself and a friend. The tone of the piece is great—nostalgic but tough, in a rush to get you to understand what she saw, but the way she does it, narrating both film footage of San Francisco in the late 1960s, and her childhood and young womanhood along those same streets takes its time. I like how her sentences are clipped at the end, the backward glance a threat she’s made good on.
A funny and true part: She recounts being arrested for shoplifting and having her photo taken with a Polaroid camera and for the first time she looks good in a picture. The tragedy that it’s the only photo she can’t keep.
Another part that rings true:
I never wrote about most of the people from the Blue Lamp. The bar is gone. The main characters have died. Perhaps I feared that if I transformed them into fiction I’d lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has evaporated. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. In this sense, a conversion narrative is built into every autobiography: the writer purports to be the one who remembers, who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer is no longer that person. In writing things down, she is reborn. And yet still defined by the actions she took, even if she now distances herself from them. In all a writer’s supposed self-exposure, her claim to authentic experience, the thing she leaves out is the galling idea that her life might become a subject put to paper. Might fill the pages of a book.
Learning to edit film negatives is a way of teaching myself to see photographs anew. It’s very much like how it is when you first start writing. I find myself looking for references to see if the edits I’m making are “correct”. I’m usually able to do this because I photograph the same things over and over with different cameras. I turn off the filters when I reference the iphone version, or I check what I did with the xpro2 but I have that set on a very specific film simulation recipe that’s supposed to look like William Eggleston photos. I’m probably going to play around soon and come up with my own settings with more saturated reds. Maybe I took another photo with my point and shoot medium format, or the mamiya rz67 (I’m currently working through expired Lomo 400 iso 120 film, so, it’s medium format for the foreseeable, and that film has its own look). It was only until today that I fully understood that much like with writing, it’s not references I need, but technique. I need to better understand highlights and contrast. I need to know what all the possibilities inside Lightroom offer me.
Today is the first time I was satisfied with an edit. I’m sure if I look at it a few months from now I’ll see things I’d change, but I felt ownership over the negative in a way I haven’t previously.
Fuji GA645ZI, Lomo 400, 120 film
Another fuji fp100c reclaimed negative. I like how I was able to bring back the texture of the window curtains.
Until next time…
Adalena
I love to receive comments and questions about photography and cameras!
My email: adalenakavanagh@gmail.com
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Original photography prints: adalenakavanagh.bigcartel.com (I change out the shop every month of so. If you see something you like, let me know, I’m happy to make you a print.)
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-Adalena Kavanagh