Romancing the Lens

Romancing the Lens

I've been sitting here for the past few hours scanning my first batch of photos.  These are the pictures that I took a few weeks ago when I went on my first trek with film.  While I've been dying to see them, I've also been terrified.  I didn't want to look and find a mittful of unremarkable, souless celluloid strips.  As I sit here realizing that is almost exactly what I have, it's dawning on me that I kind of missed the point.

I told myself if I had just one picture that told a tale, that was an evocative caging of a single moment in time, that it would be golden.  I don't have that one yet, but what I do have is possibility.  I'm learning that it's not what I'm shooting, or even the technical details of the capture, but rather the absence of myself in the mix.  I look at these pictures and see that I am holding back.  I stand and hold what fascinates me at arms length, afraid to get in it's face, afraid to sink my hands into the smallest, most intimate detail of a thing that catches my eye, and that's why these are empty.  You cannot come up with a pearl unless you dive deep.  I look at B's work and see poetry and provocation, and I'm hungry for more.  I look at mine and feel almost nothing at all.

The day that B's cameras arrived, I was shaking.  I remember lifting them out of the box as if they were eggshells, touching them and exploring quietly and with reverence.  Yet this is contrary to the wisdom of a project's soul.  If you want to tell a story through your lens, you have to be fearless and unapologetic and wildly curious, crawling deep inside a thing until you've mastered it's space and it's shadows and light.  What I missed in being ginger was the passion of pouring myself in through the lens, and as a result, I have a handful of polite little vignettes, completely void of the emotions they inspired when I was stealing them that day.

So you'd think I'd be disappointed, but I'm not.  Instead, I'm sitting here touching things and realizing that it's this very tactile part of this project is one of the things that I enjoy the most.  I like slipping the negatives out of their covers and tucking them into the slide scanner.  I like lining them up, and cropping them, and correcting the gamma.  I like that I can look at these separate little frames and know what camera I took them with, not by labels, but by the "feel of things", learning that each has it's own personality, and you must introduce yourself to it with more than reverence.  You have to coax it into speaking to you as you turn it about, and allow it to become your eyes.  There's something liberating about recognizing that the simple act of holding and touching and moving about is delicious, quixotic foreplay, and something to be unapologetic about.

As I slide the final strip of negatives into the scanner, I'm still not sure if I've got that one great and accidental pic, but I know that I'm energized and hungry to get back out there and try again, and cannot wait until the black and white rolls I shot in Chicago last weekend will reveal the moment I finally loosened up, got into people's faces, and simply had fun.

Baron, you may never know how much the simple act of reaching out to draw me in and share this thing with you has meant.  It's more than simply reclaiming my love of something I once cared about a long time ago.  It's giving me permission to be a kid again, to see the world with curious, playful eyes, and to reconnect with that fearless part of myself that you bring out in me in the most profound ways.

Templum ex obscurum, baby.

Sue.