I’m an atheist. If I’m being honest I’m a pessimistic agnostic who can only imagine a monist conception of god if forced to imagine god at all. To many this might imply a lack of faith, but they don’t know I shoot film.
I began by setting up the seamless paper background on two stands, although as I write this I realize I had begun weeks before when I moved all the furniture in the room against the walls for unrelated reasons and thus cleared up the space necessary to later set up my makeshift studio. And if I’m being honest in my deconstruction of this process I’d find that it started much earlier than that, when all is said and done I might be able to push the beginning as far back as my birth, after all if the art I produce and the artist I become are the result of a dynamic system extremely sensitive to initial conditions it all begins with birth. I am nothing more than a conduit for experience and my art is ultimately an amalgam of these experiences, and this produces some anxiety in me for I realize that whatever my work says about my subjects it says tenfold more about me.
I was slow and methodical in setting up my work area. I took great pleasure in sliding the roll of paper from inside the box it came in and onto the stands’ supporting rod. I worked in silence while Heather got ready in the next room. Once the background was set up all that was left to begin was to load a roll of film into the Yashica.
I loaded the roll of film into the camera with the nervous austerity I expect from the hapless bastard who must load a single bullet into a six-shooter and spin that roulette. With a roll of twelve my odds would appear twice as good, except that each and every one of those shots might be my ruin; there are no blanks.
Although loading a roll of film into a camera and the anticipation that accompanies this act produces a psychological analogue to the gut-wrenching fear and anxiety of preparing for a game of russian roulette, the analogy is flawed. First, it is not at my own head that I aim the barrel of my lens, but at others and so I fear for them as much as I fear for myself. Second, while the function of the apparatus is the question which produces anxiety in both instances, in russian roulette the hope is that the firing mechanism will align with an empty chamber or jam if it doesn’t, while in film photography you hope for the opposite outcome, and ultimately walk away physically unscathed regardless of that outcome.
As much as shooting a roll of film feels like a reckoning with my mortality, the stakes are not as high in a material sense, after all how can a wasted roll of film compare to a life lost? Sontag claimed all photographs are memento morí, and this is perhaps true of those photographs which technically speaking are well exposed and clearly representational. But in a way loading and shooting a roll of film feels like a personal memento morí, one that encompasses my work as well as my life, for each wasted frame is a reminder that the body of work I leave behind is simply an accumulation of mistakes, failed attempts and loss. And as someone who aspires to the title of artist, who already conflates their self with the identity of artist, I have conflated in the act of taking a photograph my literal mortality with the fear of being forgotten. Mediocrity is a worse fate than true ineptitude, if only because the latter is celebrated and remembered while the former fades into obscurity without much pomp or circumstance. Truly abysmal work is its own spectacle, as midnight screenings across the country of The Room or Troll 2 can attest.
There was a palpable tension in the room that seemed to prop up the proceedings like a dark matter lattice. I felt like the act I was about to perform required a superhuman amount of concentration, required the focus of a brain surgeon or sicario (which amounts to the same thing in some cases) and so I worked as slowly shooting my roll as I had worked to set up. There occurred in this process a transference, my burden of utmost concentration became my subject’s. She would strike a pose and hold it with the unnerving stillness of street performers who paint themselves bronze or silver and play at being statues. The strain didn’t register on film, but we developed a rhythm like novice freedivers, exhaling deeply between shots and gasping for air before the next. The light changed very little as the hours passed, but the room became warmer and more humid. My focus was such that as I looked down through the waistfinder trying to frame the shot while accounting for parallax, I could feel my forehead perspire and a thin film of sweat form. My subject remained poised, even as the tension increased with my own frustration at the idiosyncrasies of the twin lens system.
There was a sense of relief when I shot the final frame of that first roll. The entire room exhaled. I questioned whether or not to shoot another roll: I was sure that I had loaded the film wrong so I wanted to shoot another roll for safety, especially because I still had an hour left of good light and it made no sense to postpone for another day when I’d have to rearrange the furniture and set everything up again. But I wasn’t sure I could ask that of my model, though I knew she’d be willing. To submit to my vision was to submit to a tyrant.
I loaded the second roll of film as carefully as the first (the act of loading a revolver is simple relative to loading a camera, even though the stakes are higher), and yet there was less severity to the act this time around. In fact the entire process went imperceptibly better. I hardly looked up from the waistfinder as I moved from side to side around my subject, looking for the best angle, winding the crank not like a revolver but a gatling gun, each frame fired in relative quick succession. It took me half as much time to shoot the second roll as it did the first: this roll was for safety, and yet shooting that first roll allowed me to work in a less calculated manner. I was glad I had decided to shoot that second roll, the act had proven itself a kind of intermezzo.
After it was all said and done I took down the seamless paper and the stands, I rearranged the furniture and put the twin lens cap back on the Yashica. In a way it is the closest analogue to the experience of conception available to me, the negative safely spooled in the belly of the camera exposed but unknown. That which is conceived a product of the seeming indeterminism of my creativity (and the free will I think implied) and the hard determinism of photochemistry. The fruit of my labor is not my own, at least momentarily when I entrust another to extricate my composition from the unexposed emulsion, entrust them to safeguard the integrity of that moment from the process which brings it into being, for even in a photograph time is not fixed. The negative emerges wet from the tray: an object representative of my creative will.
As is so often the case in nature, the end of one process simply marks the beginning of another. Once the negatives are in my possession the process of selection begins, and so too does the process of reverse engineering those unintentional mistakes and serendipitous successes.
