I've been using a film camera a lot lately. Although it's handy having a phone in your pocket that you can use to make instant photos when someone dents your car or you need to read the small print on a medicine bottle or a gallery wall, using film feels much more like making something special. These days it feels as if technology is trying to do everything for you, remembering your phone numbers and addresses, curating your Google searches and sorting your emails, and making all your photos look lovely - perfectly exposed and lit with a weird iPhone light.
With an old-fashioned film camera you actually have to do something more than just pressing a virtual button. On my camera I have to think a bit before I shoot, and I have to think a bit more because what I really like doing, especially on a trip to a new city or country, is taking double exposures.
This is not the same as putting a couple of pictures into Photoshop and layering them over each other. That's far too intentional for me. I stick the film in the camera and shoot a whole reel of backgrounds first. These might be patterns, or landscapes or fields of flowers, anything really as long as it's consistent. Then I rewind the film, hopefully without the canister swallowing the leader, and reshoot the whole film, often mainly with people, but in reality not worrying too much, simply trying to bear in mind that if the backgrounds are soft then the second layer will need to be more graphic. For me it's a perfect combination of randomness and planning, which is kind of how I used to write children's books.
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| A digital photo |
The thing is, if you go to a much-photographed place like the Alhambra in Granada you'll probably only go once and the weather and the light might or might not be great for you, and the perfect, atmospheric pictures will already be available in books and on postcards and it seems slightly pointless to take a photo like this, although I did take it, as you see. This was twenty years ago.
But the atmosphere of that visit, and of the place, is recaptured far better for me by the double exposures I took at the same time, even though, not having done it before, I forgot that it would be a good idea to keep the camera the same way round all the time. The added oddness comes from using slide film and then processing it as if it was colour print film - an extra layer of random.
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| Cross-processed double exposures |
When I start writing a story, I love the idea that something is coming into life that wasn't there before, and that even I don't know what it's going to be. Sure, there's a certain amount of planning involved, but I never know exactly what a character is going to say, or where they're going to end up. The end result may be terrible, or it may not, but it's always something new. And that's exactly how I feel about this kind of photography.
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