Essay Masterclass / References
Sitting in my makeshift darkroom, I shut off the water spilling into the developing tank. My prize waits in its cocoon of chemicals. I uncoil the film, memories strangely unfamiliar in their plasticky permanence.
Images accentuate life. A picture of soldiers tiptoeing through a dystopian wasteland was one of the earliest to lodge itself in my memory. This was "overseas", I was told. So when Dad departed home to begin our new life "overseas", I was utterly convinced that New Zealand would embody this visual hellscape.
My fears were quelled by new sights, suburbs, pukekos, greenstone, when Mum and I packed our bags and landed. We never really unpacked. In the twelve years since, I've moved house ten times. As the restless years picked me up and dropped me off at new thresholds, I erased myself everyway from the places of my childhood. Best friends would melt, time and again, into memory.
Each new bedroom was a rainforest of spontaneous regeneration, where new routines and busy parents left little room for reflection. Even though my digital SLR camera crisply punctuated every moment, a hazy film clogged yesterday. It was too easy to relentlessly snap away; abundance quashed "preservation" into a blurry, unending stream. If one picture speaks a thousand words, I carried millions of words all spoken at once.
I inspect my actualised memories for scratches.
I wouldn't care so much about these negatives if I hadn't discovered Mum's old Nikon and a solitary roll of film. I put down my beloved Canon and rationed that roll over a whole summer. I was a selective guardian of thirty-six tiny moments, able to etch my viewpoints into something tangible. As I selected, condensed, and haphazardly stitched together intermittent points in time, I practised deliberate reflection in specific moments. I grounded myself in reserving space for analogue in a shifting digital world.
Film's permanency is potent because it stores authenticity. Like the unfiltered light hitting the gelatine coating, I took to directly imprinting people and emotions onto myself. Only the handpicked ones, that is. Perhaps paradoxically, this mindful sensitivity made me feel stronger and in control.
I scan and examine the negatives.
Here, the apples on our tree swell in our seventh home for the first time. My father holds a pumpkin up to the branches, chortling as if he found it growing there. I crystallise them in silver halides, which now remind me of why I sit down to dinner with him every weeknight.
Next photo.
Upper Tama Lake greets me when I finally arrive, drenched wet and windburned. On our sixth and final day, a question had divided our hiking group: Should we take the uphill scenic detour rather than a shower? The blue glass water urges me to always say, "Yes."
I am in Queenstown on a twilight walk, unknowingly blackening seven frames as the dusk sneaks in. In fact, my startled face darts out of the top corner of one underexposed picture. These are experiments in refinement , not wasteful mistakes. Here, actual memory will have to suffice.
Introspective reflection has allowed me extroverted expression. The values and connotations I have preserved are channelled into future images as new perspectives. The frame doesn't need or want me inside, yet it has always permitted self-expression within its walls. It shows people who and what I love: the squishy balls of stardust I converse with, the tennis courts on which I drill serves until it feels like drumming a rhythm. That's more essentially me than any physical presence.
I still shoot digital extensively, but usually for school events or art class projects. Film is my treat. Thirty-six frames were not made for indulgence, so I live first and photograph second. Every captured photon is a breath briefly bridging the linearity of time, asking me to observe and remember the moments that eventually constitute myself.
I load another roll into the camera for tomorrow.