Sending Love Across Time
Why I decided to document my life
I shot my first roll of film in the mountains of Colorado in September of 2020. I had been on a camping trip with my cousin, my brother and his girlfriend for ten days. It was Colorado in Autumn–a photographer’s dream. I snapped what I thought were going to be award-winning images.
A few weeks later, I got the scans back from the lab and not a single image had come out. The photos were blurrier than a sorority girl’s iPhone camera roll on a Sunday morning. Either I was a terrible photographer, or the 35-millimeter camera that my mother-in-law had found in her closet was dysfunctional. I’m going to go with the latter.
Like many photographers in my generation, I started my photography journey in reverse. In other words, I was trying advanced digital techniques before I had even mastered the fundamentals. But in 2020, I discovered the secret that hipsters have been hiding all these years: the wonderful nostalgia of film photography. Even though that first roll was a dud, I kept trying. I became enamored by the process of shooting film–even more so than the resulting image.
My photography style suddenly changed. And so did something inside me.
When I was shooting digital, my motivation was external. I shot a million and one images hoping that at least one would impress people. The photos became worthless because they were abundant. And, because digital cameras immediately show you a preview of each picture, I became fixated on the result rather than the moment I was capturing. In other words, digital photography pulled me out of the moment. When I started shooting film, on the other hand, I noticed that the opposite would happen. I would sink deeper into the moment.
Film photography is to digital photography what reading is to watching a movie. When you watch a movie, the screen feeds you the entirety of the story. Yes, you have to follow along with the narrative but your imagination can disengage. A character’s voice or appearance, a landscape’s texture and terrain, and the lighting in a room are all given to you as you observe passively. But, if you read a book, your imagination is entirely engaged. You are only given a description in words and your mind is forced to fill in the blanks. This is why reading is meditative–it demands full focus. And so does film photography (pun intended).
In film photography, there are no previews. You just have to imagine what the final image will look like, until much later when you finally develop the photo. When you are in the moment, you are solving an imaginary puzzle with your given tools. The thought process is such: this film stock, in this scene, combined with this lighting, at this aperture, and this shutter speed, should (in theory) produce an image that looks like *imagine final result*
For me, this process, like reading, has been addictive. That’s partially why I started spending money on film photography and sold most of my digital gear. But, something else happened when I got my film rolls back from the lab each time. Looking through my photos, felt like looking through the old photo albums and scrapbooks my grandparents used to have on their bookshelves.
This nostalgic effect that film is known for turned me into a documentarian of my own life. I stopped shooting photos of things that didn’t matter to me just because I thought they would get ‘likes’ or praise. Instead, I started pointing my lens at things that mattered most to me. I was documenting the things and people that I loved in a way that was enhancing the sweetness of memory.
Two months ago, I lost my grandfather. After he died, I took home some of his favorite shirts. I kept his fountain pen, engraved with his name. My family shares dozens of images and videos of him and some very fond memories. These artifacts are the pieces of the puzzle that was his essence. They are not him and they never will be. Still, he lives on through these in our memories. When I hold his pen, I can hear his voice and the way he said my name. When I look at a picture of him, I remember the funny way he danced.
Nowadays, when I take photos I don’t think of any immediate rewards, like praise on social media or even print sales. Most of my photos don’t even make it onto social media. Instead, I take photos of the people and things that I love, things that define my life, and landscapes that have made my jaw drop. All so that I can one day share these images with my children or my children’s children. And maybe, when I am long gone, they can reach back through time and reconnect with the love that brought them into the world.
When I started writing this blog in January, I wasn’t motivated by any tangible reward. I simply wanted to throw pieces of myself out in the world. Whenever I write an essay like this one, I always imagine myself speaking to one of my younger brothers or a future grandchild that doesn’t exist yet. I only have one goal: that one day, someone I love might read these essays and find some sort of value in them. Maybe they will know me a little bit better or learn something from my life, or maybe they’ll think ‘Grandpa was a weirdo’ and laugh.
I’ve never quite put this sentiment to words, but this is the best explanation I can give as to why I feel compelled to document things in pictures or in writing. To me, documenting my life is not only a practical way to track how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown, but most importantly it is a way to simply capture feelings and transmit them across time. Maybe that sounds pretentious, but that’s the truth.
While photography and writing are my preferred mediums of documentation, I think we can all apply this mentality to whatever we choose to do. What are we leaving behind for future generations? Life lessons? Stories? Pictures? Art? All of these are forms of love that we can send across time so that our children don’t have to start from scratch. Let me try to explain what I mean by that…
No one exists in isolation. We all live on the foundations of millions of stories, some triumphant and some tragic. But, if we don’t understand where we come from–if we don’t have any connections to our ancestors–then we can feel isolated. We can feel like we are starting from zero.
The more I document my life, my memories, and the lessons I’ve learned, the more I can serve as a foundation for my future children. If I can somehow help them understand everything I’ve learned and everything I’ve loved, then maybe they can pick up where I left off and continue to grow and perpetuate some goodness in the world.
Maybe this doesn’t make much sense, but if nothing else… Maybe in 100 years my great-great-grandchild will read this and be inspired to snap a film photo or write a story or something. And, I’m sure nothing bad will come out of that.
The photograph of the lake is beautiful