Fistful of Film | Kodachrome 25

Fingers? Cold and wrapped around a cable release. Legs? Cold and restless. Face? Cold and scrunched into the sunlight. Ears? Listening to a podcast that I am barely paying attention to.  

Camera? Loaded with Kodachrome 25 on a tripod. It’s waiting for the perfect anonymous stranger. It waited long enough; it was made by Kodak for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and has lost a couple stops of sensitivity. Its also lost its color, as the native process for developing Kodachrome as its intended color slide has been inaccessible for years. Only a few minutes in I was antsy to move to the next spot.  

I haven’t shot street this way before, and I stick out. Tourists occasionally throw a peace sign and smile, but they’re always in the wrong spot, in shadows that my camera can’t see. Sometimes they ask to take a peek at the photo I didn’t actually take, and I tell them it's film. They always seem confused.  

I developed the film in D-76 with a heavy soak beforehand. Yellow and orange pour down the drain. Developer, stop, fixer, and then I clean the black coating off the Kodachrome with water and baking soda. Finished with a wetting agent. Hang to dry.  

I left a little bit of blue tint from the inverted orange emulsion as a nod to the film’s colorful roots.  

 

 

Are you alright?

A Chevy Avalanche sits along the road north of Lebel-Sur-Quevillon in French Quebec. The forests have disappeared, wide open spaces sprawl into a marshy green and low trees.

A large man waves his arms by the Chevy. My car squeaks along and shudders as I begin easing onto the brakes. I end up passing him but see him waving his arms over his head desperately from the middle of the road in my rearview mirror.

I turn around and turn my window down one stiff crank at a time. He walks up to my car and I’m a little surprised when my English lands.

“Are you alright?”
“Uh, yeah, do you have a smoke?” he replies.

Mass for an Earthquake

Aleppo, Syria, one of the major Syrian cities that was hit, is 5623.409 miles away from this little onion shaped church that holds a personal grief. Their February mass was held for the victims of the Syrian-Turkish earthquake. Most of the congregation is Syrian, much of the mass was celebrated in Arabic.

The St. George Greek Antiochian Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania was a collection of families mourning together. Father Meletios Zafaran spoke about great loss. When all is taken away, a spiritual belief in God is all that we have to face the world and our own personal failures.

We are not so alone yet. The collection bowls were passed around and filled. Parishioners with family back in Syria wept.

A young boy in a blue coat ran to the prayer candles and began to blow them out. I watched from above as his father scooped him up and carried him back to their seats. Siblings pestered each other in quiet moments as if they were in their own private bubbles. The church was filled with a warm heartbeat.

 

Connective Tissue

I’d be nervous if I was shooting a story on slow growing moss and lichen. Nerves ripples through my brain right before every assignment. Photographing street is how I soothe myself in the in-between moments. In the hurry-up-and-wait of New York City, photographing street is how I relax my brain.

These images are the fragile connective tissue between destinations and a race against the clock.

Boston, 2023

I had studio jobs lined up in Boston, but they fell through. I was left to roam the streets, and this is what I found.

The narrow streets are perfect for cutting light and are even better corridors for fog. It rained and snowed most of the days that I was there, but I photographed anyway. Umbrellas walked by, dribbling water onto manicured sidewalks.

The shops around Beacon Hill glow with neon signs and large picture windows provide reflections. They fed my lens with color and symmetry.

The people were sweet compared to a place like New York and every age group is here. The buildings here feel huge, diverse, and full of character. Curling art deco, brutalist concrete and old churches fueled me. It was exciting.

I spent a lot of my time in the Grand Central Library pouring over M.C. Escher books. The man was a graphic genius to say the least and his art books appropriately resided in the modern wing of the library, in red books shelves with graphic carpets and lighting.

John Singer Sargent, who made a series of panel murals of blood red biblical imagery in the library once told his students to: “cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation.” Big cities at first feel chaotic, like they are ready to burst at the seams. Over time, walking with a camera and shooting the street, it becomes ordered and predictable like a clock. Watching the elements of a city play with each other is the joy of shooting street.

Cross Country: The Middle Bit

Nebraska is wide. Giant houses in the middle of nowhere. Teenagers in cars that are beat senseless pulling in at odd angles into a gas station parking lot. Crude crosses, shotgun shells in camping spots, and an odd rogue air and space museum that isn’t on google maps. The deserts of grass spill into Colorado in gentle waves.

The Rockies in Colorado feel sharp, looming, but never entirely static. Rocks slide down cliffs during a storm, flash flood warnings blare on the radio. The next day, peaceful clouds and I drive by a relaxed moose. They’re huge and infamously dangerous. I don’t stop, but I appreciate that they are there.  

Salt.

The Great Salt Lake is lined with dead birds, resting on the salty shore. Some of them only leave skeletons, others are corpses mummified from the outside while their insides have rotted out. Probably pelicans. Coming from the east coast, northern Utah feels ancient. It gives the impression of a place that has been there since always and sees every species as a blink.

Birds are brined on the outside in a thick layer of sand- black and likely just as salty as the rest called basalt. Flies everywhere, but not around the skeletons, which sit as castles long since conquered. They are apex scavengers. Only the sound of flies cuts through. Scattered around are signs of human life; the smoldering remains of campfires, a ruined fender from a dirt bike, and the occasional beer can litter the sand.  

A spiral is carved into the ground nearby, an art project at the end of a dusty road with “no trespassing” signs, with ranch names on either side. The spiral has changed colors over the years, reflecting its salt content in various conditions. At the time of its construction, the water surrounding was red and pink from algae, one of the few organic inhabitants of the lake. The hill behind me has a marble podium with no trail leading up to it. It has a spiral carved into the front, mirroring the spiral in the ground. On top, it has an inscription about how the spiral is around 50 years old, a mere nanosecond compared to the age of everything around it but the leftover birds. It feels much older than that. It looks like it belongs. It has a name, and it’s Spiral Jetty. It used to be submerged, drawing a striking figure against the water. Now, through drought, the spiral stands against sand. Only rain can fill it again. The artist died a few years after finishing Spiral Jetty.

I lost cell signal immediately upon hitting this gravel road and resigned myself to the silence. The sun set, and I could see a couple lights dancing in the distance. They struck me as lonely.  When night falls, the mosquitoes come and mingle with the flies. I ended up killing them all, as there was nothing, but a numbing silence left as the final glow of the sun got snuffed out behind the horizon.