You are, perhaps, trying to make dinner, or trying to walk the dog, or trying to attend to your job but on your desk, or on your counter, or in your hand your phone brings up a picture from 2016, offering a curated slideshow of images that follow, unearthing forgotten days, events, places, people. Then you need to find out what happened to those people, those places, that perhaps you have lost touch with. Ten minutes or maybe even an hour later you wonder if this is how you spend your time now, seeing these images of a different time instead of being in life in the way that resulted in those pictures to begin with.

For the last five months something like has been an experience of mine on an almost weekly basis, as I’ve finally decided to make digital all of the film I've exposed since I started exposing film over twenty years ago. I can remember a lot of the pictures I made, and others have totally vanished from my consciousness, leaving me to piece together how they came about using only the other pictures on the rolls of film as context clues.

Delving into the archive is an exercise in focus. Every roll of film is a potential derailment, a potential thread that, when pulled, can result in minutes into hours of time floating into the ether.

I still can’t quite articulate the right reflection why I am doing this, that might be for another letter.¹

Right now, for this note, I am starting back towards the beginning, though I expect there will be little chronological adherence to any subsequent archival posts.

In the fall semester of 2005 as a student at University of Illinois, I would occasionally take an evening to drive off of campus onto country roads and highways with no destination in mind. Sometimes I was with a friend or two, sometimes I was by myself. I always brought with me 120 slide film (usually a version of Fuji’s Provia) and the YashicaMat 124g I bought for about $200 from the now defunct used camera shop in my hometown. Apparently I also had a tripod, but I’ve no real recollection of this. I probably had a cable release for the camera too, though I don’t remember this either.

The Yashica was my first medium format camera and it was a stretch for me to get. I still felt a pang of disappointment every time I had to use it instead of the Hasselblad available for students to check out in the art school. Since I wasn’t an official art student, just an interloper taking electives, my access was limited. The Yashica didn't have the signature two notches on the left side of the film border, which, if you paid attention, and when I was 21 years old, I did, was the mark of the Hasselblad, the mark of some unearned legitimacy.

More importantly, the lens of the Yashica had a certain "glow" to it - rendering images a little foggy, a little unsharp, a little flat. You could see the differences in the negatives. 20 years later, I don't care about these things. I wish that I didn't spend time then caring. It didn’t matter, it doesn't matter. If a picture isn't good, it's not really because of the lens.

But back to the act.

I would stand out in the rain or the mist, or the wind whipping across the fields. I would set my camera up, open the shutter and then go sit in my car if the weather was too uncomfortable. Otherwise I would stare at the dark sky and wonder what the film might pick up. After I closed the shutter I might try something slightly different, or go to a new place. Some nights I only made a couple of pictures. A picture could take ten or thirty minutes of just sitting there. Maybe more, I don’t remember.

The vast flatness of central Illinois had very little for me to photograph, or so I felt, so I delved into more meta photographic interests. I delved into things like long exposures, color shifts resulting from reciprocity failure (essentially, when film is pushed past its limits), and cross-processing (developing film in the “wrong” chemicals yielding significant color inaccuracies). The landscape became a sort of backdrop onto which I could explore these ideas.

Looking back on the pictures I understand them also as early attempts to be more attuned to the subtleties of a more uniform landscape, something that I think has followed me all of this time. Despite it feeling like there was nothing out there but land and sky, I did try to make intentional compositions. I endeavored to use what I knew and what I had to make something that turned a visual record into a little piece of something that carried with it a sense of awe, wonder, or magic. It’s not clear I succeeded, but that’s not so important to me now.

What I see now is that I took the time to be still, to study, to look out into the distance and wonder what might come of it. This wasn't really what my classmates were doing on Friday nights. In recent years I often attempt to block out time to be open to that sort of magic in the world again, in that way that recalls what I was doing twenty years ago. Sometimes, a camera will not even be part of it. It doesn't need to be. Actually, too often - photography being a relatively concrete medium - it can kill that experience. The last time I felt I was in this place was only two days ago, out to dinner at a favorite restaurant with my wife. The calm just washes over in a way that is at the same time overwhelming and peaceful. A camera had no place there.

Sometimes there is a camera though, you go out looking with purpose and something ineffable makes it through the lens, all the way onto the film. It might not even be a good picture by most measures, but if it isn't fully self explanatory on viewing, that might be enough. Delving back into these slides is a good lesson in that.

Hope you find yourself well on this November day.

If you’d like to see more of these images I’ve posted a gallery here.