20.1.26
recently a lot of my friends have been taking film photos at events and such, and there seems to be a resurgence of 'inconvenience' as a social movement against the enshittification of technology and hobbies, as well as a return to older more traditional mediums like film to be more conscious of our consumption and creation.
my dad is a huge film photography enthusiast, and i was around it a lot in later adolescence and i think he really wanted to share it with me but i only ever had a passing interest at best. recently we've been connecting a bit more since he's moved interstate and now that we don't have to live with eachother, i think we appreciate one-another a lot more. so when someone arrived to a hangout with an unclaimed 'free' film camera they were giving away- i took it as a sign to get off my ass and get into something new and exciting, and had another friend teach me how to load, eject, and roll the film. then another friend of the show nudged me to getting a roll of film and go out to shoot some snaps together. most of these photos are from that day, and i just wanted to talk about technology, inconvenience, memories, and obviously photography.
also my friends will be replaced by pictures of cats for privacy reasons, i didnt realise they'd fit so well though lmao
killing the perfectionist
now full transparency, i've done photography before in school with a very passionate teacher and have a photographer dad, etc. etc. so i'm no stranger to the medium which i think really helped me get over this crippling fear i have of doing something new and embarassing myself over it.
in digital photography, i can always take like 30 snaps of the exact same thing with minor tweaks until i decide which one is the best and then tidy that one up further in post. in film? tough shit you don't even get to SEE the $2 photo you just took until a week later! this was actually really scary to me, especially attaching a monetary value to it because now my mistakes can't be covered up! kyaa! so scary! which is such a funny thing now writing back on it because the most touching pieces of art to me are ones that are almost 'accidentally art' where it just captures something very raw and unpolished in a way before it gets put through the post-processing that we put on the things we publish.
film kind of tricked me into creating art i like, being, the very transient moments of life that are punctuated with our personal eccentricities and flaws that make us whole. the roll i used (fuji 400) with this camera also had this really noisy dream-like quality which turned out gorgeous and accentuated this sentiment really beautifully that i think would've never come out the way it did if i had the opportunity to tweak and alter it like in digital.
exploring the familiar
all of these photos were from the same day, being where three of us went on a little stroll around our city with no clear destination and just followed what seemed immediately interesting. we followed construction zones, sourceless venue music, and whoever walked the fastest and so- ended up going into a lot of places that i don't think i would have ever gone myself outside of a similar scenario. it's kind of insane to think about how the city i've lived in/near all my life has so many places i've literally never seen before because i never took a certain side street, or went into that half-zoned off area.
i was having a conversation the other day aswell and the phrase 'being a tourist in your own country' came up, and it kind of got this gear turning again about how much of my country i take for granted and kind of glaze over because it's just a place i'm familiar with. i think i want to, in this sense, use photography to explore the places and people i love and am familiar with- which in a non-wanky way basically means to me i want to capture the landscapes hidden in my plain sight, as well as capture the sides of people that show off how i see them in my mind. that's kind of been a throughline of my poetry and art in general, and i think that's in part due to how my memory works- or rather- doesn't... aaaand segue
how to remember
let me frame this section very quickly with some context:
- i have aphantasia (meaning, i cannot readily visualise things in my mind- which yes- includes in memory recall)
- i have poor spatial awareness and find it difficult to gain my bearings in new places
- i have extremely mundane dreams that are often indistinguishible from real life and they get muddled with my actual memories
and so especially after graduating highschool and not having things practically remembered for me, i've always been grappling with my memory in a way that doesn't seem like many of my peers do. bits and pieces about my friends get jumbled, i can never recall people based off their physical descriptions, i can't remember what places look like, my sense of time in memories is warped because there is no visual reminder of age and so i get fragments of memories from years ago coming back as if they were a few months ago.
anyways, this is a roundabout way of saying that blogging and google photos/my calendar have been so incredibly useful for me in this sense! every time someone asks 'how has your week been' i get a little physical paralysis and need to check my 'memory bank' as i call it, where i look through my calendar and photos to jog my memory as to what's actually happened in the past week. however from an aesthetic standpoint, i kind of hate the look of photos on my phone and end up taking a lot of 'fluff' photos that clog up my internal storage too @.@ so i've been trying to take things on my digi/film camera instead to be both more intentional with the photos/memories i preserve (and ofc looking a lot nicer and more evocative!)
i'm still undecided if this is a good or bad thing, but one of my favourite pasttimes is just flinging through my phone's photo gallery and seeing where i land and looking through old memories. i think it's a big way of how i process and ground myself in change, in that i can look back on myself and reflect on how different/the same things are and the feelings surrounding that movement which can at times be pretty painful- but i think that too is helpful in identifying what does this memory dig up that i'm upset about. i never really gave this much thought until thinking about photos themselves, but i think it's a really helpful tool to check in on my life if i'm ever feeling shit and just see how i was doing a year ago and just realise "yeah, maybe i'm still moving forward despite it all".
memory is odd, and photos help me with it and is a fun medium to explore, basically.
updates (boring life stuff)
life has been going pretty well, i've mostly been spending time with new people and feeling a bit closer to people i might've fallen off with just due to time passing, and tiddling around with this blog in my off hours. i've started uni with this weird pre-honours intensive that i've already started not attending due to a bad tutor and a worse course that i've been butting heads with already whoops!!!
also i've just kind of been in a weird place mentally with my transition where i've come to terms with being a clocky little transgender and assuming my appearance is enough to tell the whole story, but it's actually almost got me in trouble recently where i've had a few people i think actually take me for a cis woman??? i'm not sure how i feel about that entirely, but equally i'm not sure gender will ever make sense in the context of a single idetntiy for me so i've not paid it much mind outside of now probably having to have to disclose to people that i am transgender but now from the other side of the fence which is a little funny atleast, albeit very annoying.
outside of uni and gender though!! i think i'm at the stage where i'm coming down from a very dramatic december and early january and just cruising along a bit which leaves me with some melancholic feelings i guess, but i think that's part of the natural course of "exciting and intense" so i'm not too bummed out about not having all these new experiences and adventures for a bit. makes the heart grow fonder after all!
blog updates
i don't have the time or mental capacity to tinker with programming at any level, but i would like to rejig the home page to have a 'most recent' feed, etc. as well as some better formatting for my writings, but it's just something in the back of my mind that i'll come back to once i have a little more time! as well as always being unhappy with the visual layout HAHA so i'm very sorry if you got attached to one style!! i hope i'll land on something that keeps me hooked for a while soon ;-;
also i just wanted to say i am very proud of the new blog title 'works on my machine' as 1. a funny thing i say all the time, 2. a reference to the literal writing works that were indeed, left on my machine and posted, and 3. a funny jab at my lack of programming expertise and constantly tweaking things that i break!! i just had to make sure the genius of it was not lost on my dear viewers and not mistaken for a mere funny title!!!
have a good end of january!
january is always a weird as fuck month where it feels like everything is pure chaos and mayhem as the new year shakes the box of life for a bit until everything settles into its right place. it's been a lot of reflection for me atleast, and i get that sentiment from a lot of friends and a lot of sweeping changes coming up for a lot of people so i just wanted to hope that your january closes out a bit neater, and a little less frantically with some newfound clarity. hopefully your enemies repent, and your friends tell you how much they love you.
i'll see y'all around for the next post, which might be about writing with my upcoming publication! we'll see though, i'm not too sure :)