Alchemy

It’s been too long since I’ve sat down at a keyboard with the intention of putting words into order for people to read who aren’t simply myself. It’s been far longer since I’ve done this for just the joy of it, to create something and share it with those interested.

If you’re here, thank you! This project is intended to be a creative outlet, to allow me to share my words and photography in a more flexible format than just throwing things up on [insert social media platform here] without real curation or organization. I hope you’ll enjoy these interludes - I can’t say I know exactly what form this will take issue-to-issue. Some months may be heavier on words, some may be heavier on writing, but my commitment to providing some form of creation will remain.

I’ve been a photographer my whole life. It’s a gift handed down from my father, who majored in mass communications when that meant photography, writing, ratio, and television. I grew up on the stories of his time in the industry - the fire lines he and my mom drove behind during one of the many west Texas fire summers, the story he called in for NPR from a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, when he and his roommate recorded C130s doing touch-and-goes at the Air Force base.

It was in this spirit of documentation that I had my hands on disposable film cameras before the age of 10. I cannot find the photos now, but I have such a vivid memory of using my disposable camera to take pictures of my American Girl dolls having a New Year’s Eve party on January 31st, 1999. After that it was the Canon PowerShot A430² , a 4 megapixel digital point-and-shoot that documented nearly all of my high school adventures, such as they were. As a high-schooler in the mid 2000s, this was the peak for the point-and-shoot digital cameras. Flip-phones and slide phones ruled the world and the pictures they produced certainly had a flavor to them, the grain and color quality of something being taken using a piece of plastic. If you wanted your pictures to turn out at all, you used a point-and-shoot - plus, with SD cards coming in such exciting storage sizes as 256 MB as standard and 2 GB and 4 GB³ if you were lucky!

With the digital era truly upon us, technology leaping by the minute , it seems strange now that this is when I first fell in love with film. By some chance of fate, I went to a high school with not only a darkroom,⁴ but a photography program that utilized that darkroom. Stepping into that room for the first time felt like magic. Not only was this the one place in school I could use my CD Walkman to listen to my Evanescence CD(stolen from my dad), but it was the place that I could experience magic - the alchemy of using chemicals to capture light on paper.

Other things impressed themselves upon me then, as well. The fundamentals of composition - leading lines, repeating patterns, natural versus mechanical. The ephemeral nature of emulsion, the fact that the chemicals that captured the light could be destroyed by light as well. Even in the small-storage digital era, going back to 24 shots a roll⁵ was a limitation - every shot had to be chosen with care. (Not every shot was, going by some of the contact sheets I’ve found from then, but the idea was there.)

While the love faded when I graduated and no longer had reliable access to a darkroom that didn’t cost money, I didn’t stop taking pictures. I simply switched to a D-SLR I’d been given for graduation (because I wouldn’t stop taking my dad’s D-SLR and he wanted to actually use it), and then, as time passed, became becalmed on other pathways.

Fast-forward about 15 years, and we come back to that Pentax K1000. Somehow, we come back to film - the physical, made digital with the advent of scanning services and websites.

When I started writing, I meant for this introduction to be a simple few words on my philosophy and my history - but now, 800 words later on how a 2000s girl came back to shooting film - I think the point I’m trying to make is about the physical act of creation. I’m a photographer because I say I am one, because I’ve invested myself in the act of creating images. Photography is nothing but the split-second capture of what someone sees inside their head, clarified using editing. It’s not quite truth, but something like. It’s alchemy. It’s capturing the light, the essence of experience, with limited margin for error.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you! I promise the next one will have a little larger of a theme than simply “here’s how I got here.”

Pre-Footnote Footnotes:

(a) A song: “Yeti” by Paris Paloma. I’ve been listening to her for the righteous anger of her words for the last week and a half, but for some reason “Yeti” is taking me somewhere I might have to photograph.
(b) An unrelated thought: Does anyone know why the only time you get the best ideas for big personal projects are when you’re trying to finish a gift for someone else?
(c) A recipe (kinda): Did you know that if you toss cubed butternut squash with oil, salt, and pepper in an oven at 400˚F for 30 minutes, put shredded kale (see above) in at the 20 minute mark, and then toss all of that with balsamic vinegar + marmalade + mushroom umami powder and add dried cranberries and pecans that it’s a great side dish for literally any protein? This has become a once-a-week staple for me in the fall and winter, and if you line your sheet pan right, every dish goes in the dishwasher. A personal win.

1  What I mean here is “things that aren’t the in-character journal of my D&D character, which only my DM reads.”

2  I’ve had thoughts recently about trying to resurrect the PowerShot, tap into a sense of nostalgia, but that might end up being a step too far even for me.

3  and if you were buying them at Costco, you had to take the cardboard representation to the register and wait for someone to go get your dinner plate-sized cardboard with a single SD card attached to it because it was a high-priced item.

4  This was a darkroom built in 2004! An entirely new wing was added in 2004, and only 20 years ago it would have been impossible to be a top-notch school with a competitive newspaper and yearbook program without a darkroom. By the time I attended, we were 100% digital for the productions, but everyone had to take photography and learn how to develop film.

5  I still have a single roll of AristaEdu 400 ISO black and white film from high school. I keep trying to find the perfect project to shoot with it - I’ll likely have to act as if it’s 100 ISO or 50 ISO to get anything worth the price of development.