Author: Creepy Lesbo (London, UK)
Website: Click here
View on Map
Category: [cool]  

There was a time, quite a few years ago now, that I lived above a shop.

At the time I was studying photography - I was in my first year, and thus had not been exposed to the usual photography mafia in the form of bald-headed lecturers and tutors who decided what was art and what wasn't, what was decent and what wasn't.

I discovered later that anything with a naked woman would probably get you an 'A' mark.

Especially if her tampon string was showing.

That is the cynical world of photography critique however, and that was something I was oblivious to at this time.

I was a young art student, not in the traditional sense of the word, not in that bohemian way, nor in the drug-addled-mind way either.

I was fresh faced and inexperienced, having arrived eagerly from the horrors of A Levels at a 6th Form, not even a college had I been attended to study for those years, I'd stayed at my old school.

This meant that I'd never experienced the world before.

I was a bird that had flown the coop for the first time, the world was no longer safe and known to me, but I had yet to be tarnished by the horrors of the real world.

I, essentially, had the eyes of innocence.

Or you could say naivety.

And I had chosen photography as my course, not from some dire need to express myself or my pain, nor for some intention for leaving a mark on the world or some inflated ego or desire to produce 'art'.

No, I had chosen photography because it sounded like fun.

I'd been in a darkroom once at school as part of one of those infuriating 'free period' things, where in fact, you didn't have a free period because they made you do something pointless, like a debate class and such things. I think they called them PGSE or something.

They were largely a bit of a waste of time.

However, I'd been lucky enough to sign up for photography and get in for a term.

During that one period a week I got exactly two chances to print something in the darkroom.

They didn't tell us how, they just let us get on with playing (and accidentally exposing everyone's paper to light when they took the negative draw out when the enlarger was still on. We've all done it at some point...

So I lived above a shop, which I had access to.

And I had plenty of spare time.

And a camera.

Far too much spare time.

And the owners of the shop were often not around.

So I used to play.

Explore.

Find my way around in this new, big world I found myself in.

And my tool of exploration was my dad's old camera.

I can't begin to explain the excitement of photography with an old SLR.

It's a process of trial and error at first - I had a big pile of film that never made it thanks to my lack of knowledge on the exposure side of things.

Aperture. Exposure. It's all a bit foreign to me. Even now.

Technology made me lazy.

The 'art' and skill in photography is in knowing what the numbers mean and how that will translate to your piece of light exposed paper.

I was never good with numbers.

So I played by myself (*phnarr*).

I looked at things through my lens and fiddled and experimented and decided that I liked to take stupid pictures of things so you could barely make out what they were.

And that is how I found myself spending more and more time in this dusty, disused shop.

It reminded me of my parent's house.

It had stacks of junk everywhere.

There were broken chairs, doors, tables and all sorts of wooden furniture everywhere and everything had a healthy layer of dust gently lain upon its unpainted skeleton.

There were old glasses, bottles, all sorts of useless crockery and timber based paraphernalia.

So I took pictures of it.

I aimed my eye through stuff and took pictures of other things, wondering how they'd come out. If they'd come out.

What it would look like.

How would it differ in black and white from my technicolor real-life version.

Looking forward to developing it, handling the film excitedly in the dark as I wound it onto the reel and positioned it in a tank, to be filled with strange smelling chemicals which I had mixed, but didn't understand.

Fear that someone might turn a light on, or that you would scratch the film accidentally in your haste to have it tucked away safely in the black Tardis imitator.

Your film would go in one way and emerge; wet and reborn as something else.

Something to be feared and excited by.

Had it worked?

Would they look good?

Would you be proud of any?

Would they invoke memories of taking it again.

Make you remember it all. Like a temperal time warp back to the past.

And then the gentle cleaning, like handling an infant.

Terrified it would break or harm in your large, clumsy hands, that the cloth would be too harsh on it's delicate skin and would tear holes in your precious treasure.

It was yours.

All yours.

Like a handcrafted, fragile necklace, which you hid from others' prying eyes until you had visually feasted greedily on the contents, on every aspect, fully.

Feeling gorged on the pictures, of the contents you would show others the negatives, or perhaps only the contact sheet, holding them at bay from your overly protected newborn.

This was the last picture I took on one of my first roles of film.

My tutor started to joke in later years that my best work was always at the end of the roll.

Like I was wasting time up to then.

Waiting for the right point for the inspiration to strike.

It's an old chair.

Taken through the bottom of a glass.

This submission has been viewed 4227 times.