I’m sitting at my desk in our new home. I just finished setting up my film scanning gear and it’s a thing of beauty. Many sleeves of developed film negatives have been (literally) piling up around me, silently judging my lack of momentum. It feels good to be back in action.
One of the greatest challenges of publishing work from home is finding the balance that it requires to stay active and present in both places. My priorities during this phase of life are clearly anchored in the well-being of my family – I can’t imagine it any other way. There’s important work to be done in both places, yes, but work is like a river (ongoing) and humans are like plants (temporal).
We happily upload pictures to Google Photos every single day. The ability to centrally locate moments of our lives has been an important foundation for both me and my wife over the course of our marriage. I cannot overstate the immense gravity felt by this simple act, nor the importance of each image as a history of our lives together.
Most days, it’s an easy choice: save the memory of a loved one in a way that will allow it to be reviewed later. I carry a camera with me all the time (my phone) and missing a moment is more devastating than losing the connection with the creative process. So we capture moments with our phones and into Google Photos they go.
But I cannot ignore the angst that I feel when not uploading a photo to Instagram for weeks or months at a time. That too is not a fleeting emotion. After a while, I start to question the very act of making a picture in the first place.
Capturing moments from daily life onto photographic film requires mastering a very unforgiving medium. Patterned reflections of light find their eternal rest, carefully arranged amid silver halide crystals, and time itself seems frozen in place.
These reflections stand as witnesses to moments that would otherwise be lost. It’s an important work that I personally find immense fulfillment participating in.
Like it or not, sharing that work feels like part of the process. I mean, what happens to words that are unspoken? Who else notices a moment when it otherwise slips away?
Each time I load a camera with film, I wonder: “Will anyone ever see these frames?”
I hear the rebuttal coming from the piles of negatives: “How are you supposed to improve unless you examine the past?”
It’s true. I need to complete the scanning process to learn from my own work.
Sometimes, late at night, I can’t help but answer: “Perhaps I’ll be one of those artists whose work is discovered long after they are dead. You scrawny negatives will end up in a wooden chest, crammed into a dark attic, slowly being eaten away by the march of time. Who knows if your ability to accurately reproduce what I saw through my viewfinder will even be possible.”
…to be clear, most days I just load the camera and walk out of the room. I digress.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Yet, as it’s such a human thing to do, I’m guessing most of us need a reminder to…ya know…not do it.
Perhaps you have a great balance between creating and consuming but I’m still very much a work in progress on that front. Watching others constantly pump out new creative works is inspiring and crushing all at the same time.
However, I need to remember that the important updates were stored within Google Photos, not Instagram. Regardless of how many film negatives sit in the yet-to-be-scanned pile, I made the choice to not prioritize them.
Hindsight may yield additional clarity but I can’t imagine trading any single memory in Google Photos for a random film scan on Instagram. That was a conscious choice of my own free will and it means something.
It means, when I look back at this season of life, I need to be happy with the choices that I’ve made. I need to remember these moments accurately. Because, if I’m being honest, I truly couldn’t be any happier than I am right now.