sunday afternoon camera musings...

so my quest for the handmade, the long way, the “traditional” process has perhaps been thwarted today. yesterday, i took a roll of black and white pictures with my dad’s old canon ae-1 camera. it’s beautiful.



and i don’t really know how to use it. i needed the manual to figure out how to load the film, and flipping through it made me realize that if pictures came out well, it would be a fluke, because with a manual camera, you really do have control over so many parts of the picture-taking process. and apparently cameras have diaphragms. who knew?

so i took 24 pictures... some of a stunning kb...


...(well, she took a few too!)

...and got them developed today. at walgreens. and i found out that the film is not even true black and white film because it has to be processed in color chemicals. boo.

what i want is for someone to teach me how to use that camera. i don’t want to read a book about it and experiment on my own, become self-taught. nope. i want someone to show me how to use this machine. and i want to develop the pictures myself in a darkroom, not drop it off at a drug store to be run through a machine. i want control of the process; i want to know how to work the medium.



i figured that an intro photo class at UNM would be a good place to start, right? well, aj told me today that all of those intro classes are digital, that they don’t work with manual cameras anymore or use a darkroom. there might be a special “old fashioned” class for that in the future.

i long for those old methods. sure, i primarily write on a computer, for grad school, at work, and at home, but i also write letters and make art on my manual typewriters. i value the process of putting the word on paper. i like how the typewriter key stamps an inked impression onto the paper, how the bell rings to remind you to return the carriage. we type virtual words on virtual pieces of paper that we can then send to a printer to make tangible. i’m certainly not a technophobe, or a luddite, but i believe that the process itself is important, and beautiful.


clearly, if you take a typing class now, you sit in front of a computer, not a typewriter, and there are important reasons for that. writing for business, for school, for SPEED… of course on a computer! but for art? which brings me back to the disappointing news about the photo class. i love actually using typewriters; so do many old men. but manual cameras and darkroom developing… aren't those less obscure? isn’t that process central for an artist?

i know i’m searching for some kind of “purity” of process, or “traditional” method that doesn’t really exist. i have romantic notions of the authentic that i know i have invented or inherited, but still don’t want to abandon. i’m looking at my pictures right now, in prints and on a cd, and i’m adjusting the levels, increasing or decreasing the exposure, digitally playing with them so they look good, because on their own, most of them don’t! but i feel guilty as i do, as though i’m undermining their integrity somehow. photos are always manipulated realities, whether they are digitally or manually altered, or left entirely alone. we use them to represent truth, to serve as evidence, but they are moments without context, images loaded with meaning, ready to be admired, interpreted, framed, cherished or discarded. so why the attachment to the old ways, why the insistence on taking photos that are somehow more real? there is at least a sense of permanency with film – you can’t take a picture, hate it, delete it, retake it (ad nauseam). you don’t know what a picture looks like until you develop it. and it’s not contained on a tiny photo card, but imprinted on a roll of film, as type-written words on a page can’t be deleted or moved around at will. the process matters. so do the ingredients.


ANYWAY, i’m off to do yardwork during the hottest part of the day. seems like a good idea. and as soon as kb gets home from her new job, we’re going to find out if it’s hot enough in albuquerque today to fry an egg on the hood of my car. i think it is! stay tuned…