Recording the life at hand through photography

“How is Cameron? Is he still making weird photographs?”

These were questions recently asked of my mother by a neighbour’s son, someone I had grown up with then lost contact once we’d fledged. He had been one of the school darkroom hangouts at the same time as me and described to my mother a picture that I had made back then, which apparently had caused quite a stir. It was an artistic rendition of a burnt-out car, a car which had been stolen from the other side of the ‘scheme’ (council housing estate) then dumped and torched in the wooded area where we played. I vaguely remember it, although like everything else I produced back then it has long gone.

As the year in analogue progressed, I found myself entering Winogrand’s world once again, where we photograph things to see what they look like when photographed and everything is photographable - a grainy image of my own shadow, scenes from my daily wanders in the countryside near my home, the outside world viewed through the net curtains of my garage and of course some street. Somehow shooting film had made the uninteresting become interesting again, at least to me anyway. I was on a journey, exploring film types and the results of using different developers. I’m guessing I went through the same process to a limited extent back at school, but I can’t remember it. However, the twenty-first century learning curve is much shorter thanks to Youtube and various dedicated websites. We can benefit from other people’s experiences in an instant. The Massive Dev Chart website and the associated phone app will provide detailed timings for virtually any combination of film and developer, and websites such as filmdev.org show pictorial examples of the same. These combined to negate the need for the experimentation that I had envisaged earlier in the year.

So, now at the end of the second quarter, this year in film has panned out much differently to what I had expected. After switching from scanning negatives to digitising with my Lumix mirrorless I was getting much better end results than I had initially expected. Additionally, thanks to bulk loading and some nifty eBay trading, costs are a fraction of what I’d anticipated. I now have two distinctly separate workflows – digital for the documentary work where I need consistency and precision, analogue for everything else.

Going back to that burnt out car, I don’t know if anyone actually liked my picture, but in reality, that isn’t so important in the grand scheme of things. The fact that it can be recalled almost fifty years later, long after I’d forgotten about it, is what really matters.