TMAX 100, or, How I Learned to Stop Fearing and Push my Film A Walk from 6, Via Gino Capponi to the Corsini Gardens, September 14, 2024. Florence, Italy These are my favorite personal photos from the year. They were taken on my least favorite film camera on an expired roll of film stock I had never used. I was outrageously melodramatic in Florence. I’ll spare you the details, because it was the exact experience that any truly passionate art student has the first time they go to Italy. We lose our minds a little. I had it in my head that if I couldn’t make Italy look beautiful on film, I was quitting photography. I was worthless. I had the passion but not the talent. And I shot many, many terrible rolls of film in Florence. (Melodramatic, remember?) I’d like you to know I brought four different types of cameras to Florence for six days. All of the melodrama could have been avoided if I brought two fewer cameras, drank more nice Tuscan wine, and took myself a lot less seriously. I relaxed exactly one day of the trip, enough to allow myself to get lost on the way back to my apartment. I found an art fair (quite literally stumbled into it, white pants onto green lawn) in a palace gardens. I stayed for hours. I bought a perfume from a young man who loved Cy Twombly and begged me not to speak Italian, his English was good enough, thanks a million. I think I bought soap from nuns. I sat in the brambles. This was the last roll I scanned when I came home. I had no hopes for it, a well-expired roll of Kodak tmax 100 that I wasn’t even sure I loaded properly. It was my Tuscan redemption, fingers crossed, please-god. Impressions of sensation: I feel sun through netting. I smell Iris laundry detergent. I smell grass. I smell miles of cypress as the sun sets into purple hillside. I smell the salt of tears on my skin because I cried at the Uffizi because I cry at everything. Yeah, first time in Tuscany, we get it. The photos did what I wanted. They became a silver pool, still and clear, in the middle of a vast wood. The opening scenes of C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew - a forest of mirrors into other worlds.
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