Revisiting old film, rebranding failure as nostalgia.

 I've been shooting on film for about a year, and I've shot enough film that I often don't get all the way through the back catalog of film I have shot and developed, so I find myself with piles of negatives from months ago that I've never seen fit to use. These images of course all represent individual moments in time through my camera's lens and my artistic eye. One of the rolls of film I was hesitant to scan, despite having taken the time to develop it, was a roll I shot on Mt. Tamalpais in northern California over winter break. This roll is plagued with light leaks, development issues, and an overlap between the final two images. This is why I never wanted to scan it in the past. 

However, reading the Jurgenson reading for today gave me an idea. I liked the idea of nostalgia as "the jealousy the present has for the past" (27). I figured if I tried to tell a story in the curation and framing of the pictures that would create an idea of the past that, if not fabricated, then certainly acontextual. I chose pictures from the roll that have no people in them (with one notable exception) to tell the story of an untouched, unpopulated world. I also varied the exposure of the scans to bring forward certain elements at the expense of others, especially relating to the light leaks. I found one of the images had a hidden image of birds in one of the light leaks. I liked the element of nostalgic rediscovery in scanning these images and finding hidden aspects. I chose one image that has my friend's face hidden by a light leak. I feel like this image tells a story that should be hearkened back to like a childhood vacation picture. I sought the jealousy of the present towards the past with these pictures, and I'm really happy how they turned out.