So I mentioned in my last post that I got a Holga and have been shooting film. It’s part of a super short toy camera workshop I’m taking at the Art Studio in Berkeley (because what’s the patented Sierra way for dealing with being overwhelmed? why throwing another thing on the pile of course! It’s cool, you can steal it, I won’t sue).

I had this grand theory that I’m somehow inferior as a photographer because I’ve only ever shot digitally and am self-taught and in order to understand the true nature of the art, I needed to dive back into the roots and gain some solid technical grounding and slave away in the dark room before I could get a real appreciation of the medium, etc…woe is me artsy whine whine whine etc…

But that all sounded kind of boring and like it would take a long time, so I thought instead I would take this toy camera class and get a quick primer in the darkroom to see if film photography was worth pursuing.

Enter: Holga.  To non-camera-enthusiasts, let me explain the joy that is the Holga. It’s basically a total piece of shit camera that sometimes doesn’t even work and breaks and light leaks in from everywhere and has crazy vignetting and has a lens that’s made of plastic and it costs about $25. (Hint: if your Holga isn’t “working” the right way aka leaking light and being crappy, you’re supposed to drop it a few times and hope that it comes around).

So if you’re like my mom, you’re now asking so ummm why would anyone want to shoot with that? Especially when you have a semi-nice SLR? Well, because sometimes the stars align and you can eek out quite lovely, ethereal images (or so I’ve been told). Or because you really like a challenge. Or because you’re kind of bored with perfectly crisp, photoshopped-to-the-hilt images being heralded as the future of the art and think that they often lose something essential along the way. Or because you want to harken back to a time when it was about the moment, and nothing could just be “corrected later.” Aka you’re feeling quite smugly nostalgic for a time you didn’t even live through. Also, you sound like kind of a snob. Just sayin’.

So I got my Holga and learned how to load film and off we went to L.A. for the weekend. I didn’t even bring my other camera because I didn’t want to tempt myself. I shot 12 pictures on the trip, frustrated at my inability to control anything, hoping the exposure was close, guessing at where the lens was even really pointing (it has a viewfinder, but don’t let it fool you, it’s actually just a hole and has nothing to do with where the actual lens is looking). I kind of hated it, but I also kind of loved it because it made me really edit what I shot, and I eagerly anticipated my little photo-zygotes.

If my life were a movie, the story would end like this: girl learns to let go of control, shoots images recklessly, is rewarded with fantastic photos that tap into the essence of what it means to be alive, turns away from soul-deadening modern trappings and rediscovers her creative, whimsical roots.

Of course, in that scenario, the heroine probably would’ve managed to tape up her film properly.

But of course I didn’t and it unrolled in the light and ahhhhhh half of it gone in a flash! Then later, when I’m trying to put it on the spool in the dark, I drop it and step on it, but I don’t tell anyone because a girl can only take so much humiliation and I figure if a giant shoe print shows up on my negative, I will just write an artist’s statement saying I did it on purpose to showcase the messy process by which ‘real’ art is created and submit it to a gallery. I decide this will win me awards and then I will get to be the next Annie Liebowitz except without all the photoshopped Vanity Fair covers because I will keep it authentic.

I develop it anyways because hey it’s a class and what else am I supposed to do and find myself thinking of all the useful things I could be doing as I pour chemical after chemical through funnels and agitate, agitate, agitate the film.

I squeegee off the negatives and look at the giant black boxes that make up most of our trip to L.A. and I wish I had brought my other camera so I could have that great shot I took of the road side fruit stand. I think that while my style tends towards the nostalgic and the whimsical, perhaps my equipment should…..not.

Three of the pictures actually show up, having managed to avoid the treacherous light and am glad that one of them was this one with the giant white plastic dog, which I was excited about and thought could be great in black and white because it was a white on white scene in real life and would be all shadow & texture in film.

Yesterday, I’m back in the dark room, learning how to print and I print the dog and when it appears like magic in the developer solution I fall in love a little bit and decide I actually adore the fine film grain and the vignetting and maybe even the image and I leave clutching a 7 x 7 square and think at least I can blog this.

But of course I can’t really blog it because when I try to scan it (using our not-so-lovely work scanner), it loses all it’s lovely detail and soft eeriness and becomes the super dark, grainy mess you see above because I’m basically making a photocopy of it. And then I think about all the work I just did to get one stupid photo and how it looks like a shell of its actual self and isn’t even worth posting but I’ve spent all this time on it and I want to scream a little bit but instead I sit down and write this post.

When I’m done writing, I find myself on ebay and steal a beat up Anscoflex out from under someone in the last 20 seconds of an auction ($12 shipped!). Now I have another delicious, rusty piece of junk on its way (sorry again, Steve) and frankly, I really cannot wait.

• May 7th, 2009
• favorites, musings
• 1 comment
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