I find myself stepping back…. looking for ways to take my personal life and shift backwards into a time less tech dependent…… . But hey, here I am on the computer, blogging….so I haven’t quite achieved nirvana, quite yet.
Although this process from getting to A to Z is a bit easier to do since I retired from a long career in education. Yikes, no more zoom meetings to attend, or relentless software updates ….nor emails to read and a ‘to-do’ list full of work related substances. It is gone man, and a huge portion of that was tech crap. With life in general, I feel humans have overstepped boundaries marking a clear delineation between what is technology and what is human. And the scary thing is that I perceive of this ‘now’…which is AI and Social Media in still its infancy.
So I have decided to return to a time in which my comfort zone resides in… I was just talking with my nephew and we were chatting about circa 1970-90’s…. an era in when I feel humanity was at a pretty top end of things in terms of creature comfort and knowledge yet little technology as we know of it today. But during that relatively brief era, a combination of technology and the social media which accompanied, has brought an era of increasing dismay and surely skepticism.
So my quest has been a return to a time now unknown to many and forgotten by an equal number. …that of a more analog world. For instance in my situation, there was a time I was over-reliant upon You Tube and it became addictive. And in our camera world, where the technology and ease of camera plus lens made it relatively easy to be void of both fun and creativity to arrive at capturing shots. I speak of extreme ISO’s or AF or more or less just ‘press and snap’ to take images in the camera world and to call yourself a photographer.
Don’t misunderstand me as I arrived at this conclusion based upon my thoughts, or my problem and I couldn’t care less about your stance. Go ahead and embed a chip in your brain or invest $20,000 in Leica cameras + lens. Shoot proudly with that red dot. Or take your newest Fuji 100 (whatever alphabet we are on now to designate model) and shoot it too. Use memory cards or no, better yet, Wi-fi your images to your phone or upload to the cloud. Again, not for me. Likewise, share my images with the world and be in constant anticipation of someone ‘liking’ your image with a thumbs up. It becomes all about social media and not the photography. Or if you elect, become a prisoner to social media and constantly worry about a You Tube Channel or Instagram or whatever senseless social media platform comes into existence, for they will always be there, friendless changing.
For…. I will continue to chip away at that hype and inhuman existence and strive for ‘none of the above’. I purposely elect to shoot with analog cameras and I take control by developing my own film. I even use caffenol where I can, as evident by what is in my refrigerator now cooling down and in the image I provided below. I even choose to enlarge my 35mm film negatives and create alternative printing from them. Some may label it as imperfect or lacking mainstream, but hey, so what? I might even hesitate to take the ancient medium of colored pencils and begin to shade in color into my BW images. Shame on me.
All of that forces me to pull back. I view the world of 1970’s—1980’s and say, okay…where can I bring today back into yesterday….It is possible but not always doable. For instance in with my camera hobby, I am not 100% analog for I obviously haven’t achieved pure analog (IE: this blog / Squarespace or DP Review). While I scan my film negatives I enlarge them from 35mm to 6” x 9” or there about and I do it using Pixelmator which is an old Apple app. I like to physically view my images and hold them in my hands so by enlarging this allows me to use alternative printing to showcase my art. If I decide to create a zine, I send them off to Mixam for printing.
So no, not 100% analog but a few baby steps toward. The end result of my imperfect masterpieces created using alternative processes fits my need for now. I have become more comfortable in my own analog skin and less reliant on digital. Perhaps I will find a need for a complete dark room set-up but no need to rush. My current studio works. But this analog process is one that slows me down and allows me to reflect. I am more at peace, less stressed, less reliant upon digital and less need to be perfect, in my imperfect world regarding results. I have taken a step back in my time. Below is a shot of my caffenol percolating in the refrigerator so I can develop a few rolls I took the other week.
