A few months ago, I decided to start exploring film photography. I bought myself a vintage 35mm film camera, a few rolls of film, watched loads of YouTube tutorials about how cameras work – the exposure triangle and so on – and read lots of books. Then, I just started taking photographs.
In the process of taking those photographs, I wasn’t thinking about what I’d do with them. I was focussed on understanding the technical skills of using my camera, reading light, exposing well, and being increasingly aware and sensitive to what was in my frame before I pressed the shutter button. I simply took photos of things that interested me. With every 36 shots, I reloaded a film canister and started over.
A week or so ago, I finally received scans of 6 months of photographs. There were, as expected, some I really liked and some I completely stuffed up. But, what emerged from these 180 or so individual frames was a pattern – I seemed to enjoy taking quiet photos of people and nature.
Seeing those photographs gave me an idea: human – nature; a photographic art project exploring the main thing I’ve been thinking about, subconsciously and consciously for the last few years: humanity’s dependence on and relationship with nature.
When I picked up my camera, I wasn’t thinking about this project as an output, I was simply interested in learning about how to take photos, what photography might be for, and whether I’d enjoy it. (And, as it turns out, I really love it). But, what’s more interesting to me is that what happened with the camera already happens with my drawing practice; the meaning of the work evolves from doing and seeing the work, first.
In my drawing practice, I sit down with a pencil and paper and just start making marks. It’s in the process of viewing those marks that ideas about what I want to draw emerge. In my photography practice, it’s the same. I simply take photos for the experience of taking photos and, in viewing the final images (sometimes, months later), see things that I never saw before. Seeing those things give ideas to explore further. And that, in turn, feeds the physical act of making photographs.
There are many people I know who are intimidated by the blank page – I don’t know what to draw, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to make a picture of – but I’ve learned, in several mediums now, that the only way to know those things is by engaging in the act, first, no matter how ‘aimless’ it seems to begin with.