On this series of newsletters I'll talk about a new project that I started (officially, I guess) last month, which is my new zine. And this time I'm finishing this shit! ('cause I kinda have a tendency of not finishing my projects… more on that later, maybe).
As someone who has photography as her main form of expression, I photograph very little. I mean very little. My catalog, counting both digital and film, has around 22 thousand images, and it started back in 2010 (I talked about how I started photographing in my very first newsletter, that you can find here, and it's the one before this one, so you can't miss it lol).
I mean, this is a 12 year old run and includes both my personal projects and my commissioned works to clients. I now that most of you might be shocked with this information. Depending on the type of photography you do, 20K is a years worth of pictures. If you're a photojournalist you could have even more. But I also know that some of you might relate to my experience, so to those people: I feel you!
Though that's really not the point. The point is, due to the fact that I'm a slow photographer (especially now that I mostly shoot film and it can take me several month to finish a single 35mm roll) it takes me even longer to start a new project, not to mention finishing it.
I don't think this is a bad thing, though. It's just how I work. It's part of my creative process. By allowing myself to get to know the places I'm at, and experiencing theses places in my own way, I feel that I can see things that no one else will see. And that is true to every single one of us. We experience life in our own way and we see things that are only true to ourselves and no one else. And that's where the real work starts. How do we translate that particular way of seeing things to our work, wether is a single picture or is a series that'll possibly become a book of some sort? How can we reach other people with our creations?
For me it kind of starts of revisiting my catalog. I do that almost everyday. It allows me to see connections that I haven't payed attention before and to see potentials on images that I thought were not good in the first place.
And this new project (that is nameless at this point) started just like that. I had very few images - something around 10, or maybe less - that intrigued me from the moment that I saw them (they were shot on film, back in 2019, I believe, and it took me a few month to develop them, as you might have figured correctly). But they were so odd to my eyes that I didn't know what to do with them. So I left them untouched, but taking a look at them once in awhile.
Back in 2019 I was a part of a study group that the main subject was the Photobook and the visual narratives in that realm, and since part of the program was the development of our own projects I showed that particular set of images to the person that led the classes and the to other members of the group. One of the perceptions was that the images had some kind of mystery in them, and they were a bit comic as well, like they had some sort of sarcasm in them (that might have something to do to my own personality, sure, because you'll see that I have a weird sense of humor). Some were a bit daunting even. It's hard to describe. That thing stuck in my head in a way that I could not let go. I started creating this idea of maybe a murder happened but didn't go as planed, or some sort of accident... I don't know. It was odd. But again, didn't know what to do with them, so I let them be.
Jump to 3 years later (which means we're now in 2022, so this is recent), and I find myself joining a new study group; and remember that thing that I said that I'm constantly looking through my archives, in search of something that I didn't see before? Very well. Doing so I found those pictures again and decided to share them, amongst many others, to this new group. Imagine a compilation of images, old and new, that didn't directly related to each other but maybe had the possibility of doing so.
Since this is a recurring study group but members come and go every new semester, we talk about our work in the first few encounters. And so I did explain about my creative process and the reasons that I joined the group and all that stuff.
Weeks go by and each of us are trying to develop new projects. We're all trying to connect the images so we're able to create what we envisioned in the first place.
In my particular case, with those sets of images, some people bought my idea of a possible murder/accident and some people did not. And this is one the most fascinating things about art, in my opinion. We can always create our own story about something, but as soon as we put that work in the world, we cannot control it anymore. It is free to have as many interpretations as possible.
Listening to the other artists in the group allowed me to understand the possibilities of that body of work and to realize that my inicial idea wasn't going to work. It could possibly work, but not in a way that would interest me at this time being. It would require me to make decisions that I'm not in the right place at the moment to do, and that is absolutely fine. I still have that idea of a murder/accident that didn't go as planned and that is funny and sarcastic. Is it a good ideia? I don't know. Is it worth to work on that idea in a near future, to really dive in? I also don't know. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But at this moment it isn't, and I'm fine letting it go for now.
But at this time being, that particular set of pictures created a new narrative that I'm quite happy with, and that's the project that I'm looking forward to develop in these next few weeks - or probably months - and that I'm going to share with you here.
And before I go, I would like to leave here this excerpt from an interview from Louisiana Channel with Paul Graham that I saw recently. It resonated deeply with me, and I hope it does as well with you.
Hope I see you in the next one.
Sincerely,
Marina.
P.s.: Just to kill your curiosity, here are some of the photographs that initiated this hole thing. What do you think about them? Do they lead you in a mysterious, sarcastic or funny event or to something else that has nothing to do with such things? Let me know in the comments!
And to my film nerds out there, those were shot on Ilford HP5+ EI 400 with a half frame camera and developed with Ilford ID-11.