After shooting “At a Distance” in early 2020 lockdown, I was exhausted. I told my dad (a photographer himself) that, existentially speaking, I wasn’t so sure I was a “photographer”. He answered,

“As far as being a photographer goes: ya either are or ya ain’t—and you are.”

Okay maybe, but I needed a break. A break from photography as business. I needed to collect what I bypassed for a mortgage bill, skipped because I digitally “could”. I needed to put that imposter syndrome bullshit to bed, to see if Dad was right and what that meant.

So I started to shoot film.

I stopped advertising myself as a photographer and got slow and quiet. Matthew and I devoted ourselves to Ultraviolet allowing me to take my foot off the full-time photo biz gas and got back to pointing the camera at my own life. I felt that a devotion to film would bring me more deeply toward becoming the photographer I knew I was underneath the detritus of what Anastasia Pagonas aptly called, “over-professionalization.”

Film called me but it also intimidated me. The cost, the nuance of pushing and pulling and color tones, the preferences, the pretenses. The math felt outside my intelligence. What were these voices in my head? That film was too expensive, too risky, and that beside all that I’m too dumb to get it? Why was I so embarrassed to ask how to use a light meter? I’m not alone in this right? Film can be kinda culty, it’s got a heft, a lineage. Narrow is the way.

I’d shot film before. My dad tried to teach me, so did teachers in high school and college but I was so scared of getting it wrong, so afraid of the failures in learning that I wouldn’t learn. But I still wanted to shoot film so I’d see something beautiful, vaguely set settings, shoot and anxietypray that the photos would turn out.

That was my method.

I saw beauty! Shouldn’t the image gods bless me?! A broke clock is right twice a day so I’d get occasional goodies but the unpredictability validated a sense that I wasn’t “good enough” to shoot film. It made film feel more expensive than it was. Self-fulfilling prophecies are intoxicating and I know how to take myself for really dumb rides sometimes. That’s a hard pill bc in art, no one saves us from the blank page but us. There is no rescue from the arrested development that comes from not doing the thing that needs to be done: not passion, not taste, not desire.

Nothing but devotion, dedication, questions, quests, trying, testing, experience, experience, experience.

By 2022 I was on my way. Not yet a devotee I kept flirting with film. A few rolls a month maybe, different stocks. No notes…

And then my dad died. He gave me my first hurts and first loves and I watched his lights go out.

In the wake of his death I inherited an acute sense for death’s inevitability. Of life loss. Overcome by grief I resented the whole system of life, felt that to turn my energy to life, to art, to creating, to my family, to love was to turn away from him and it hurt to do that. But the lights were still on.

What did I want to do?

Jon invited Matthew and me to Cuba and that trip, the ocean, the sunshine in February infused life back into me giving context and contrast to the death shroud. The idea of shooting film brought me back to life.

I wanted to really learn how to shoot film. Even if it cost money, even if I really was too dumb, I needed to learn. So I learned.

Film is analogue. Metal, plastic, canisters, chemicals, sleeves and sleeves film is a holdable physical tool. That physicality invokes non-material spiritedness.

In the Spring of 2023 I bought the Rolleiflex 6001 from Jon. I’m sure there are more difficult cameras but this one was challenging: square format, waist finder (looking down into the camera to focus/compose), manual focus, backward view, topsy turvy, manual settings.

For 2 years I shot the Rollei. Almost every day.

I taught me, it taught me.

This camera went everywhere with me. I was its full time student. For every frame shared here there are 9 that got me there. I shot more than 2000 frames and still there were entire rolls that toppled to the ground as I learned to load, rolls with hairs in the viewfinder, underexposed rolls sent in unknowingly, frames tilted off kilter. Each roll of 120 film yielded 10 frames! The preciousness! The pressure.

So I got into the math, my light meter became an extension of my hand slowing me down. I saw more than I photographed. In these images I feel myself there making these portraits of people I met, people I love. I feel the light and the stress and the letting go. I hear the shutter. During these 2 years I entered middle age where my eye sight changed. I squinted and lifted the magnifying glass eye piece, I changed settings, I second guessed, I got it and I didn’t.

I’m a photographer because I can’t not be.

It’s for the living to make something of that; to decide what’s an investment and what’s a so-called sunk cost; to weigh the odds of what we want, to get into the fuck around and find out of it.

And what I find exceeds the word on this page. Film is for me. When I make a photo it may be a shot or it may be shit, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the making of it that calls me calls me calls me.

As far as making photographs ya either do it, or ya don’t.

I sold the Rolleiflex 6001 in the Spring of 2025.