on film

"In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I’d had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I’d had the incremental."

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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After developing the roll of film, I picked up the prints and discovered that half the photographs looked like this: riddled with light leaks, fuzz, and over-exposed corners. It took me a year to snap the whole roll, and before that, six years without so much as touching a 35mm. Needless to say, I have forgotten  much of what I once knew. The project of snapping photos and developing them a year later, though inadvertent, has proven to be an exercise in patience. Whats more, I'd forgotten what the subjects of these photos would be, and its been slightly wonderful too see things in print, that I don't recall noticing in real life.