#a210 :: Exposed film

Digital imaging technology has robbed us of the act of uncovering mystery.

I shoot everything digital now – but I still have a handful of exposed film cassettes lying around that I never bothered processing.

I remember with more than a little nostalgia the wonder of darkroom work. I learned it in school, pilule and honed it at newspapers – that chemical/alchemical skill of turning film into negatives, more about negatives into prints.

An AP photographer taught me how to pop open film cassettes with bare hands – pry the felt-lined lips of the tin cylinder apart far enough to peel them away from the torus-shaped end-caps – and how then to bend the film down its centerline just deeply enough to reel it onto stainless-steel spools in the pitch dark.

RISD teachers showed me the misery and joy of processing C-41 and E6 film, this of making cyanotypes and C prints. The acid ponk of stop bath, the toxic aroma of color fixer the color of curdled blood, the fathomless frustration of CYMK filtration – it’s all fading into memory. As I indulge in the zipless fuck of shooting digital images, plugging them into Photoshop and then tweaking them to my heart’s content, I forget the willing slavery into which darkroom work dragged me.

I don’t know what’s on this roll. And because I know it’s several years old and probably ruined by age, I don’t want to care.

But the mystery persists – what did I shoot?