In October 2022, I found my photo in a pile of old Polaroids, all of them of first-year foundations students at the Kansas City Art Institute, taken from roughly 1995 to 1997 and originally intended for the trash can. I didn’t remember the photo, but as soon as I saw it, I remembered standing in front of the red plastic sheet while I squinted at the sun and my professor took the picture. It was 1996, my first semester of college. I was eighteen.
Seeing the photo brought back memories. Of my first year in college and the years after. Of people I used to know, some of whom are now dead. Some of the memories were painful, some bittersweet. Some of them were jumbled or hazy.
In an effort to make sense of those memories, I began to pore over old sketchbooks and photographs. I archived entries from the LiveJournal I kept from 2001 to 2015. I cracked open my old binder of negatives dating back to my first year of college and decided I would reorganize and scan everything.
This effort coincided with my return to film photography, a medium that consumed much of my attention while studying printmaking at KCAI. In the early 00s, without a proper darkroom of my own, I continued to take pictures on my Pentax K1000. Digital photography wasn’t yet ubiquitous and the pictures I took on my little Olympus point-a-shoot weren’t comparable in terms of quality. Eventually, I bought a nicer Canon DSLR and found the set-up less costly, so film fell by the wayside. But I kept an old enlarger in my basement and always had planned to return to it when time and money allowed.
In 2021, I fell in a creek while hiking and broke my DSLR. That led me to pulling out my old Pentax K1000 and thinking more about returning to film. Then I saw the Polaroid, and as I began archiving old negatives in 2022, plans for new film photo projects began to take shape. This website was one of them.
Initially, my goal was simply to archive the negatives and photos and share them with friends and whoever might find them of interest on Instagram. Eventually, my plan was to house the archive on a website. As I cross-referenced materials to provide better context, I realized there was an opportunity to tell a story, and so the idea of a blog element formed.
I’m a serial blogger from way back, and you can still find my old film blog and garden blog archived on WordPress. My LiveJournal is no longer online, but I credit those years of writing for developing my voice, and I have a certain degree of nostalgia for the format, early 00s LJ in particular. Expect portions of those LJ entries to eventually make their way here, along various ephemera, starting from the 1990s and following in chronological order.
The subjects of memory and decay have long fascinated me, and the film negative seems a fitting metaphor for these explorations. But I have generally not approached these motifs through the lens of memoir or personal archives, so I’m curious to see where this project takes me as it grows.