photography: a love story

an ode to one of my first loves

somewhere along the way of this post-iphone life, i fell out of love with photography. when i realized, i was gutted. i didn’t want this apathy towards an identity i’ve held dearly for most of my life. so this past year i’ve been on an important quest to find my way back.

to understand where i got off track, i’m going back to the beginning - remembering the highs, the points of intrigue, the through-lines. there’s something really sacred to be found in our first loves and passions, the things we were excited by before we were clouded with expectations and outside opinions.

i want to say this was when i discovered photography,

but really it was with this camera - the fujifilm nexia q1 with its periwinkle purple case. i adored it.

it was a film point and shoot camera, and the greatest accessory, worn around my neck with great pride. it took soft, saturated pictures. it had a groovy form fitting case which made me feel like a true professional. i took it on the go, on our family travels but i honestly don’t have any memories of being concerned with the outcome. i loved the process and claiming a photographer’s identity.

i properly learned film as a teen on my dad’s nikon f90. when he got the nikon d90 (digital 90), i started to pay more attention, learning all the many settings the dslr had to offer.

but if i’m being honest i was never much of a technical photographer. it was always more about the sentimentality. i’m fascinated by the preciousness and randomness of a photograph. and still to this day my dad’s f90 is my go to camera. its heavy as hell but i haven’t really been bothered to learn to trust anything else.

around those teen years, i had this one roll of film which when i finally got it developed, totally rocked my world. it came from a plastic lomography camera, the ultimate grungy, grainy, heavily-vignetted camera on the market (urban outfitters) circa 2010. i loved quiet landscape photography so i had it set on the panorama mode. around that time as a family we moved from los angeles to toronto, spent time home in australia and with family in malaysia. geographically and emotionally, i was all over the place.

in all the moves this camera kept getting lost. when it would resurface i’d take a snap. because there were months and miles between each photograph, every other exposure or so, i’d forget to wind to the next. so by the time i had this roll developed, it was this incredible, continuous overlapping snapshot of my teenage angsty life in motion. on panorama mode and with some double exposures it was not a clean role of 36 shots. a bedroom window in canada bled into a farewell in malibu bled into an intimate family scene in malaysia and so on. it summarized my life so perfectly. the limitations of film were exactly what allowed this.

as an extremely nostalgic person, the next decade of my photography years was very much informed by this roll. i shot mostly on the f90, and mostly recording quiet moments - architecture, landscapes, mementos, and the occasional portrait of family and special people i couldn’t often see.

by the time i was studying photo media at art school, i had an iphone and so did the rest of the world. ironically, in that whole degree i don’t recall taking a single finished digital photo or using the lighting studio more than once. i was making video collages with public and personal archival footage. i used a digital camera at one point to make 1:1 recreations of sentimental familial objects and furniture.

but recreationally, and with social media’s ominous and steady influx, snapping a quick shot on the iphone became exponentially more regular. there was this small golden window before the cloud where the images felt more precious because if you lost the phone, you lost the photos. its so wildly different to today’s reality. i take a photo without even thinking, it gets sucked into the cloud, lost in my tens or hundreds of thousands of photos, and quite likely might never be seen again.

so why bring my 2lb nikon f90 on a trip when my iphone weighs a few ounces? when you’re australian living a 12+ hour flight away from almost everywhere in the world, space is limited, comfort is necessary, convenience is key. sadly the f90 started collecting dust at home.

my photography has always been an important starting place for other artwork, like drawing, painting, and collaging. with the preciousness gone from the nature of my iphone photos, these could no longer- or only barely be used as source material for artwork. who was i without source material? without actively adding to my archive? not to be totally dramatic, but that’s probably around the time i had my quarter life crisis.

with any good breakdown comes a great deal of discovery. something was not working and the spark was dimming dangerously low. so i turned back to what worked in the past.

• something light-weight

• something that doesn’t have the wormhole of the internet on it

• anything that counters the flatness of an iphone image

i considered a film point and shoot. a few friends had started to use them. but again, i couldn’t land on a model and i didn’t want to branch out too far. i find i am more inspired with parameters.

so last year when i was back home visiting my parents, my dad pulled out his treasured box of old family technology - a lime green ipod, walkman, handheld video camera, my beloved fujifilm nexia, and much to my excitement, a couple mini canon ixus cameras. one digital and one film. unfortunately once back in los angeles, with new batteries and film, i found both were sadly out of working order.

determined to keep my output within the family tradition, i went on ebay and i bought the next closest model to my mum’s pocket-sized digital canon ixus she had used during my childhood.

with the first shot, my spark was back.

it’s first proper outing was at hard summer music festival. getting some quick snaps of friends and favourite artists, all the while having my phone locked away did wonders for the mental health.

even though it is digital, the ritual of plugging the sd card into a card reader into my laptop and not knowing what to expect because the camera screen is so small - still gives me exactly what i was missing. unexpectedness, preciousness, roughness.

its also been a great tool to capture timestamps and workings in my studio. there’s enough immediacy to check it out later when i’m home, but not too much where i accidentally get sucked into the internet or a text conversation when simply trying to document a process.

getting use out the f90 hasn’t come as easily but i am trying. i managed to take only six photographs with it after lugging it all the way to kenya last summer. it was on my last day of a month long trip staying with a family in a rural farm off the coast of mombassa. i ran down to the mangroves and got some photos of the farm’s only baobab tree. it felt somewhat obligatory.

but the soft, fuzzy, impromptu photos on my digi cam from this trip really sung to me. i had it with me all the time. most days it was the only thing on me, just slung around my wrist - no phone, wallet, bag needed. it was small enough too that if coming across other people, it didn’t feel invasive. hypocritical i know - but i’m so embarrassed by touristic photography and conscious to avoid it where possible while continuing on my nostalgic image/memory making quest to capture special times, places, and people.

most importantly, i’ve found my way back to this medium which feels, at this point, part of my artistic dna. with the returned capturing, i’m reading, writing, and theorizing. i have new source material for artwork and used some of the images from the trip to kenya for my first new artworks in a while.

it was a good lesson and discovery in grounding, coming back to roots, and that pure sense of childhood intrigue. really there’s no reason not to be living in that state now.

here’s to this ongoing love.