For the month of March 2012, I travelled solo to North India. I haven’t written about this or even shared pictures with anybody yet (apart from phone pictures with friends & family) so thought it would be worth making a little blog post about it in relation to my photography practice.
I couldnt pick up my negs from the lab until last week… and now I have to wait sometime to be able to scan them in. The good thing about slide film though is that you can actually see what you’ve taken when you put it up to the light.
I’m excited already to share a few of my favourites with everybody because I never thought I would have had to rely on my new camera and come back with only 10 rolls of film. That’s around 100 exposures for a month, which isn’t a lot when you really think about it. I was taking just 3 pictures a day during my last week because I had taken too many at the beginning & because I thought that the 35mm film catastrophe would be resolved by that point.
If you’re interested, here’s my story…
I always always 100% rely on my 35mm, especially for documentary stuff when I travel to new places, its easy, round your neck, familiar, and over the years I’ve taught myself to be quick with it. Especially for when I travel because the world is definetly not going to stop and pose for me when I like… ok sometimes if I like, and if I ask, but then that in itself can change the picture I wanted to capture. My heart fell to the floor when I ravaged through my backback like a maniac on my first day in India, Delhi. Battery’s in film cameras tend to last a pretty long time but it just so happens that just before going I checked it and it had gone so I made sure to pack a new one. I could have just changed it there & then but I honestly didn’t think that it would fall out/ get lost on my way there. I’m still not entirely sure what happened but what I did know at the time was that they had stopped making that type of battery and I certainly was not going to find one anywhere in bloody India. My only options were to a) order one from england and it would probably arrive when I had to go back… and b) to find and buy a new film camera there. For a whole week I went through so many options, I tried everything. I even travelled miles and miles to some place, some house I had never been before, a boy who claimed to be a professional photographer & who told me he was sure he could help answered the door… turns out he was 18 years old and still at school. Surreal and totally unsuccessful but his mum made her own chocolates & gave me enough to store in my backpack for when I needed my next sugar fix.
I searched and searched everywhere, I drew attention to myself in camera shops when i was being treated unfairly, normal indian families were just waiting to get their family photos developed whilst I appeared to be the crazy white women with red cheeks, dark frazled hair, hopeless and sweating, like some crack addict desperatly trying to find her next fix. I even found a camera eventually and bought it for a stupid amount of money that I knew wasn’t worth for but it was my only chance, my last one in fact. A couple of days later the lens broke into tiny pieces, there was nothing left i could do, and this, this is when I threw my head back and raised my hands to the sky and shouted “OK OK! I GET IT! I freakin’ get it.” I couldn’t cry, or laugh, I just knew. The list of what I did during that first week to resolve this is pretty long and intense and if I hadn’t done what I had done I would probably have regretted not trying / ‘not knowing…’. When my final attempt uncannily failed I realized it was meant to be. I had tried my best and I felt I really deserved for things to work out again, but it didn’t, at least not in the way I imagined at the time. It wasn’t suppose to & instinctually I knew that my lesson was to really travel alone, not with my 35, my security & safety net, to travel with minimum distraction and maximum discipline.
Thankfully, I was left with some thing. If it had all been taken away from me completely I think I probably would have fallen into a deep coma there and then. I had to turn what felt like a photographers worst nightmare whilst travelling into something positive, even though at the time I was only doing it because if I didn’t I knew it would ruin my whole trip. I’d just bought my first medium format a couple months before… 2nd hand, no light metre, unfamiliar with 10 rolls of 120 film & I had decided to take it to India with me just to experiment with. They didn’t sell film for it where I was travelling so I couldnt even stock up, I had to really savour each roll, each exposure. So that’s what I did & that’s what I’ve come back with. Original projects went out the window & the process was an interesting & unique one. The negs that have been returned mean more to me than anybody could ever imagine, like a treasure, re-igniting to its full extent my love for photography. I cant quite put my finger on what it is about creating photographs that makes me so happy, but I feel so utterly grateful to be able to say that it does. To be able to say that I practice it.
I hope to be able to share a few of the images online by the end of June! :)
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