Old Film Pictures
The other day when I was looking for frames to put calendar pages in, I came across some old pictures I took in school. It instantly took me back in time to the late nights spent in the dark room and the strange but comforting smell of the chemicals. Shooting and developing film was such a different process from how I take pictures now. I’m sure at some level I had more of a connection to the film and the images since I spent so much time on each one, but it mostly provided a much larger potential for error, and was a helluva lot scarier if you want to know the truth.
That’s not to say that I don’t look back on those days with fond memories. The nights I spent working until early in the morning with no worries of getting up to go to work the next day were peaceful and usually ended with a good print or a developed roll of film. When I was done I had some kind of proof of all the work I had done. It was a far cry from work these days in the corporate world.
There’s less of a connection with the work I do now than with what I did then. For some reason producing work that’s sole purpose in life is to sell something, doesn’t connect with me as much as producing something that’s beautiful just for the sake of being beautiful. At work the measure of success is comes in a dollar amount. During school the measure of success came in the art’s ability to be technically correct while also telling a story or creating an emotion in the viewer.
It’s interesting to see how my own personal drive has changed, since I’ve made a career out of art. The incentive to produce work is so different. There’s less time to worry about the technical rules of layout and typography, and more time to worry about getting approval of the correct person so I can move onto the next thing on my list. All of this, of course, for that beloved paycheck at the end of the week, instead of for the love of creating something beautiful.
A lot of my art classes dealt at some level with self reflection. In photography we were required to shoot at least one self portrait on each roll of film. It was always a slightly uncomfortable image for me, this meant that you were always looking at yourself without a mirror around. Not having a mirror plays a much larger roll than you might think, when most get in front of a mirror they change the way they carry themselves. They sit up straight, they suck in whatever part of their body they wish was smaller (I never took self portraits below my shoulders) and they instantly became aware of what others were seeing. By just turning a camera around I didn’t get the same effect I did when looking into a mirror.
Most of my pictures ended up with a pretty ridiculous look on my face, mainly because I was concentrating on the lighting, the angle of the camera, and whatever else was going on. I usually had one eyebrow cocked up with my mouth hanging wide open. This one turned out pretty well, although for some reason my mouth is still hanging open. I look so dramatic with my eyebrow ring and the angelic lighting coming from behind me. Luckily lots of pictures lie, I was definitely not the ultra dramatic, emotional, angry, typical art student. I did usually have a stupid look on my face though. I think proof of my non-typical and non-dramatic ways can be summed up most easily in this picture.
I also think this is the best place to leave you, because I’ve done way more self-reflection in one post than I’ve done since I graduated, and man, it’s exhausting.
Oh and just to clarify, yes that is a pink flamingo yard ornament sitting in a desk chair, and yes I got an A+ on that roll of film. Evidently the photography professor was just as annoyed with dramatic, emotional, typical art students as I was.
