A Reel in Gray
At one point this winter, I decided I disliked seeing New England suburbia in Technicolor. Instead, I took black-and-white, 35mm film photos of my friends. We loitered at a playground attached to a primary school none of us had attended: a tiny, foreign kingdom of scuffed plastic and woodchips, neatly contained and strangely sinister. We might have visited the playground of my alma mater, but the school building was torn down 10 years ago and the lot feels like a graveyard to me.
I took photos of a grease puddle on the asphalt basketball court. I was curious about the little things: how the iridescence in the oil would appear in grayscale, if the scattered grains of pinkish salt would stay in focus. My friends climbed on monkey bars and swung over me, blocking out the overcast sky, then fell off, laughing. Where they landed on the pavement was the same no-color, ash gray of the clouds; the puddle on top was a rainbow, a nebula: ground in sky, sky in ground.
When I looked with one eye into the camera, cold fogged the lens so that everything was shrouded in mist. I aimed the viewfinder down so the top rectangle edge aligned with their throats and their heads ballooned above the camera. They exhaled clean white mist. In pixels, I knew it would look like candle smoke, and my friends would be gently luminous.
I finished the first roll of film. The lid of the new canister made a muted snap as it opened, same as a shutter pressed halfway. With another roll of film in place, I took pictures as my friends scaled a slide, and then I blurred them out of existence in photos of their glide down. I felt oddly envious, encumbered by the camera in my hand — I too wanted to go upside-down and backwards.
On my drive home from the playground, I listened to The Clash. Strummer sang about long-distance callers making long-distance calls. Snapchat informed me of my unopened messages, which I knew would be concrete faces. When I got home, the sky was already tar, and it clung to my boots.
***
I started learning film photography in high school — I was very lucky to attend a public school with a dark room, and more importantly, a wonderfully dedicated photography teacher.
We learned the basics of analog science. Film is a thin, curling strip of multilayered plastic. The layer that reacts with light is an emulsion: gelatin studded with crystals of silver. Light transforms the crystals irreversibly, blackening them, so the film is ruined if exposed completely to light. Photo paper is similarly sensitive and is kept hidden in opaque containers. Both film and printed photos must be treated with a series of caustic, pungent chemicals to preserve the images they bear. The process of developing photos is beautifully intricate, but as a consequence it is also resource-intensive, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and messy.
In my first year of college, when I no longer had regular access to a dark room, I stopped taking film pictures. Since moving home last spring, though, I have started taking them again.
The cynic in me thinks life is just more gray right now, especially compared to the saturation and vibrance of my freshman year: My dorm window looked out onto Harvard Square, lit red by constant traffic and the glowing letters of the Cambridge Savings Bank sign. But I have also been reminding myself that, although we see in color, it isn’t essential; color can distract and distort as much as it reveals. Recently, I looked through the photos I took for an art show at the end of high school. One of the more memorable pieces from that exhibition is a picture I took in late spring, of a strawberry in the lined palm of my mother’s outstretched hand. After developing the print, I painted the strawberry red. In contrast with the soft pale hand, it looks artificial, even menacing.
When I painted it, I was thinking about the movie The Wizard of Oz — how Dorothy’s rural, gritty life is depicted in black and white, while color film is used on scenes set in Oz. Color imparts a dreamlike, surreal quality to Oz; the shadows, textures, and depth of reality are better signified by shades of gray.
Compared to digital photos, film is also distinctly immutable: In film, I can’t shrink a waistline or a pore post hoc; I can’t enhance the colors of a perfectly vivid sunset. Even if I could do those things with film, I probably wouldn’t. I know I am just supposed to capture and appreciate. I no longer have the opportunity — or burden — to compete with the natural beauty of landscapes, bodies, and faces.
But valuing film for its faithfulness to reality might be misguided. My attachment to film over digital photography is just one aspect of my general anxiety about modern technology and how it constantly drives us to increase the quality and quantity of our work. When I take film photos, I convince myself that I am evading the demand to produce and perform because I’m doing it in an archaic, inefficient way. I tell myself that film photography, through its materiality and delayed gratification, connects me more meaningfully to other people than digital communication can — as if I’m subversive because I can hold a moment in time in my hand, rather than degrade it on a screen.
***
I removed Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter from my phone about a month ago. Out of my close friends from high school, I was the last to move away from social media.
Instagram in particular I was reluctant to delete. I was familiar with its harms — the quantifiable, comparable validation, the glamorous curation of artifice. Still, I told myself that the anxiety and longing I felt every time I opened the app couldn’t be FOMO; I was too self-aware for that. I told myself that social media was serving a special function during the pandemic, keeping me “in touch” with people I couldn’t be bothered to actually call.
But when I took film photos of my friends, I kept wondering which I would inevitably decide to put on social media — which platforms, in what order, whether including myself in any of the photos would make me seem self-involved or self-assured.
I hated the thought that these pictures were destined to be digitized and flattened. It felt corrupting, rendering my pictures more calculated than spontaneous. Why bother with the middleman of film, if all of these photos were going to end up on my phone anyway? It reduced the medium to a marketing gimmick for my personal brand, a meticulously cultivated, packaged quirkiness.
I didn’t want to participate in an endless stream of images detached from any physical meaning. With my friends at the playground, I realized I wanted my pictures to do more than broadcast a desirable image of my life. I wanted to pause time, to create a tangible relic of the people I love as a young adult, captured in the settings and modes of my childhood: a primary-colored playground, tinted in the grayscale of favorite movies, old techniques, and other beautiful, bygone things.
— Staff writer Talia M. Blatt can be reached at talia.blatt@thecrimson.com.