January 3, 2023

Process over product

I’ve recently jumped, head first, into a 35mm film photography rabbit hole and it’s glorious. Why? Because it exploits the tactility of physical things. There are knobs, dials, clicks, and clacks. There are no LCDs, no hidden menus, no touchscreens. The feedback isn’t immediate – I have to wait weeks for my film to be processed – so while I’m using the tool, I remain in the moment; assess the light, contrast, and composition, then… click. That’s it.

People often ask why I still work in watercolour when digital is so available, cheap, easy, and, well, risk-free in many ways. Don’t like a line or colour? Change it. Ctrl+z. Undo. Redo. Undo again. The level of refinement is endless and, if you want to, you can control each and every pixel until it’s exactly how you want it. The problem of course is that it implies that the image you can see in your head is the only correct answer, we just have to work long enough to get to it.

The same goes with image-making in digital photography. Like a scene? Snap at it – 5, 10, 50 times if you want – until you can see on the LCD screen what you can see in your head. If you beat the nail hard enough, it’ll eventually go in. Snap away on the shutter until your finger falls off.

And, whilst you may eventually be able to get your perfect result, the sensory experience between physical and digital image-making is vastly different.

As it turns out, what I love about any sort of image-making is the process. In watercolour, there is pleasure in the filling of my water pots, the weight of the water in the brush, the sound of the sloshing, the scraping against the paper; it’s inescapably multi-sensory. In fact, those things bring me much more pleasure than seeing the final book appear on a bookstore shelf.

Film photography has tapped into the same feeling. With film, the result is weeks or months away. I don’t see the photo I snapped until it’s developed. In the meantime, I can focus on the physicality and multi-sensory experience of making the image as I’m making it: assessing the light, contrast and composition. I find immense pleasure and presence in the clicks and clacks required to expose a piece of film to some light for 1/500th of a second – or more, or less. The roughness of the lens against my fingers, the weight of the camera in my hand and around my neck, the shape of the shutter speed adjuster compared to the aperture ring. And, after all that – SNAP – a mirror flicks back and forth as it’s done for almost 50 years.

I have no idea whether the image is good or not, but, as happens with watercolour, there’ll likely be things I see that I never planned to see but end up discovering with unbridled joy – stuff I could never have made had I retained full and complete control over the process. They say watercolour is best when the painter gets out of the way and lets watercolour paint itself. Maybe it’s the same for film photography. In the meantime, I can get lost in the process of both without caring so much about the product that comes from it because by the time the final piece comes around, it feels like I’ve already won.

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