Holding on, letting go:
The past feels so close sometimes it’s almost palpable, just out of reach - I can remember, but not always, not fully. Sometimes I brush past it by accident, sometimes I can bring myself closer; snapping back like an elastic band or gently submerging myself in a feeling that has made its way back up to me, a mood that I can revisit for an evening without having to live underneath it. The past doesn’t feel past, or behind - it’s all around us, in us. More circular than linear. A hug, a room.
Last winter I wrote in my diary: I tested waters while we were away, always in moments of movement. On a dark drive home where the houses could have been in Normandy, I imagined your hand in mine was someone else’s, to see how it felt. Once I’d convinced myself I looked over to see you. I was relieved, comfortable. Looking out at the fields on our last train - I tell myself I can differentiate the ones here from the ones back there - I tried to think I was going home a few years ago, the familiar journey between Dieppe and Rouen; I’d arrive at the station and make plans with old friends, sleep in my own bed. I’m not sure how I felt that time.
In both cases I wanted to move through time, feel it differently. To slip into a different rhythm, a past circle - and for a few moments, I did. A couple of months earlier during a bout of nostalgia I’d written in the same diary about feeling like I was already turning back on my life, about familiar beds, long grass, streets I used to walk at night, the laugh of an old friend: I wish I could reach back and touch, live it all again. Everything blurs together into a few images, one summer evening - I want to pull it out frame by frame, play it on loop.
There are ways to try and hold on: the circle closes in, closer. Years ago, I had a dream about a greenhouse in Glasgow that I’d visited a handful of times growing up. No one else was there and I explored slowly, walking in circles, surrounded by ferns and a thick wall of silence. For a while everything felt calm and still, feelings that I needed at the time. Ever since I woke up the next morning I’ve thought about that place often and returned whenever I can. When somewhere holds such meaning, I often want to commit it to memory: I dig my feet into the ground and try to empty my brain of any other thought, like swimming against a current, trying to remember the feeling, the place, the exact spot. So much so that this act of focusing becomes everything, becomes what I’ll remember later. If I prepare for the feelings too much I worry they’re manufactured - a ceremony of emotion. But what is made up and what is cultivated, gently held in your palm? Does loving a feeling so much that you make its bed really take away from it?
Photography, then, could be a better way to bring the past closer. Not just cementing myself in the moment, but keeping something of it; proof. Focusing on the outer, knowing the inner will follow. It’s not the only method: I pick and press flowers, collect pebbles and tram tickets, write in my diary or phone notes. When I can I return to places: another way to turn something inner into something physical, visible. To surround yourself with it. That summer I’d been to the town I grew up in, the place my family is from, the seaside town where I first lived alone, my first home and my parents' new home. Svetlana Boym suggests in her essay Nostalgia that “Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life.” This relationship, these superimpositions are what makes these returnings feel especially precious. I can’t go back that often: there’s a distance to cross, time to carve out, plans to make.
I can look at an image whenever I want, but I find they work best when I’m sparing. Photographing is saving something for later, where it’ll be transformed by time and by the medium; maybe darker, pinker, bluer, closer up than expected. I find joy and thrill in taking a picture, knowing it's there on the film, but not seeing it straight away, having that separation - always a moment out of time. The moment that stopped time is brought into the present it becomes something else, a new moment, every time.
In the first chapter of On Not Knowing, Emily Ogden writes of fleeting moments, revelations: "In any attempt to bind these moments, there is a risk. These attempts can leave us living by and bound to something, yes, but not by the surprise that broke over us once; by, instead, an impoverished version of that surprise: less threatening, but also less nourishing”. "In my very attempt to be durably changed by something, to incorporate it into my life in a lasting way, to routinize it, I abandon the love I had at first".
This risk is what I feared when writing in my diary about ceremonies of emotion - holding on too hard, looking too often - though the ambivalence I feel about these worries quickly followed. As every encounter with an image can be a new moment, every return to a place isn't a repetition of the last. Even if I do the same things, images and moments overlap with those of past trips, the hope of future returns; always enriching, turning into something bigger. Two mirrors facing each other, reflections falling into one another, again and again. The dream I remember now must be completely different from the one I actually had, but that doesn’t matter. Photographing, remembering, returning - none of them do quite what I'm trying to do, hold on, but they do something. Something that compels me, something I love. We can’t hold on to things the way they were, but maybe we can keep a loosened grip on the way they are, moving and changing, by leaving ourselves open to that change. To not knowing, not remembering, not wholly. We remember something of the love we had at first and we remember that, like all other love, time will change it.
When photographing the house I grew up in during the months leading up to our moving out, I weighed up my options: grounding myself in the moment, just being there, or focusing on photographing as much as possible. How to remember best, how to choose. In the end I tried to do both, but in the year since then, those images have slowly replaced, or more aptly overtaken, my memories - they come to mind first, I’ve spent much more time with them. When an earlier memory comes up, trembling, distant and slippery, I rarely stay with it for fear that it’ll break apart in my hands. In newer work, I’ve been trying to accept and integrate this felt nature of time. I’ve kept polaroids in a box, undated, where they slip and overlap as I bring them in to scan, becoming part of this ebb and flow of time and memory. It's not chronology or accuracy that matters to me here but, as always with images, the feeling in my chest.
Looking back upon old photos, what I wanted to hold on to, or what I was feeling, often seems so transparent. The context and understanding I have now overlaps with what I saw then. Feeling stuck with this essay, I dug up some from a few years ago: photography is time travel - I remember the air, the flavour of that day. The weight of those months ghosts on my chest, a familiar hand. These images were from a difficult time, which I didn’t fully realise was difficult while experiencing it. Going through them there were echoes of how I felt then, how I made sense of my experience and coped, how I looked out on the world during those times. Feelings, moods, epochs enter the room. An image of my partner's arm curling back over their car seat to hold my hand, a gesture of support offered, overlaid by the time between then and now, all the gestures in between, our current bond. A circle of emotions and memories forms around me. For a few hours I sit still, careful not to break it.
In A Time For New Dreams, Ben Okri writes: “photography touches us so mysteriously because we have an intuition that all things are remembered in some invisible place beyond dreams, where everything that was exists in a sort of universal, divine amber”. In her essay Poetry Is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde speaks of poetry through which we “give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt”. To me, both point to an understanding of time, a quality of time. The existence of a place not so far away where our emotions, experiences and affinities sit, often distant but always alongside us, waiting to be pulled closer. Time unpruned, unbound, unpossessed. Inhabit a place beneath my eyes, my mind, beyond thought. Where all things continue to be, in dimness and warmth; sluggish shapes falling away, swimming chaotically, slipping.
I envision it as this sea, this moving and slow lava of things, bubbling and drifting, words, moments, associations, images, everything that sticks out to you and that you notice wherever you go; taking your lens gained through repetition, what you do and who you are, as coincidence. Where past and future are in the present, already with you. And when I worry again about holding on to this place too tight, I remind myself of times I’ve found it by accident. Stumbling across a previous experience, another time, like a familiar scent on a stranger passing by. When I started taking notes for this essay, I’d been looking through work by Anne de Gelas. To me, some of her photographs feel like memories, images of a day at the beach, children playing and the reflection of the camera, the adult watching over them - but I still relate to the kids, a moment of felt freedom, summer holidays spent with cousins. Sometimes I could swear they were my own, like that blurry photo of a circus tent, too close to something I’d seen myself, a few seconds in the car ride home. Moments from childhood that I couldn’t save for later, didn’t try to hold on to - but they’re here now before me, and I remember, through someone else’s moment.
In the last few paragraphs of Poetry Is Not a Luxury, Lorde writes “for there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt”, “and there are no new pains. We have felt them all already”. I find a lot of comfort and emotion in this last sentiment - because much like de Gelas’ photograph, while I’ve only encountered it outside of myself more recently, I’ve felt it somewhere before.
Still processing:
Staring at the dim light of hands on the clock, taking note of the passage of time in the smallest sense - the matter of seconds, a few minutes - is when new inspiration comes most often. There’s been a handful of darkrooms, but this one is my favourite, maybe because it’s the most familiar: going from one tank to the next, the sounds of liquid moving and dripping, the clinking of cages and spirals. The last 3 minutes when there's nothing left to do but wait, where I’m most likely to lose track of time.
It’s a primordial space where both ideas and images are born, in darkness, muffled sounds and the smell of chemicals that you quickly grow accustomed to. I’ve developed so many rolls now that I don't need to think as I'm pulling away the paper backing and rotating the spiral in my hands, but once I have, I still check each groove, always, to make sure the film has wound on correctly. Time is the main thing I need to bring my attention to - it's easy to let an extra minute slip by as my mind wanders - I say this although my film has always come out fine, so far.
I hadn't been in that room for a few months and I'd missed it. Calm time to let my shoulders drop, to breathe more fully, to think about what might appear on the film or about whatever else comes up - like the idea to write this. Such times feel rare: if I’m awake, I’m almost always reading, writing, talking, listening to something or someone; an endless flow of words. This is also true in my practice. So much time is spent in pursuit of something - which word rings truest, which image goes next - trying to find that moment where things slot into place and your understanding is pushed forward, pulled back to what made you start in the first place, or set onto a new path. But when I stop looking, when I’m spending time in nature or in the darkroom, is usually when ideas reveal themselves. Of the two, the darkroom is most reliable: no distractions and direct, hands-on contact with the process of making and the images to come, as they solidify, turning from the photo I’d imagined into the photo I took.
There’s another thing I like about the darkroom: its safety. There’s a lock on the door and a promise of alone time. I’ve had this feeling before, when I was younger: being seen by others was overwhelming. It isn’t as much anymore, but I still get a kick out of clicking the bolt into place and that initial, deeper breath I can take; that sense of elation when no one’s around. It’s an exercise in trust - when the light goes off I trust my body’s capability to still find the right place, the things I need. On harder days I stumble a bit, dizzying shapes form in the empty space around me, but the initial nerves soon drip down and away, lines of light reveal themselves, around the door and up near the ceiling. On good days I know the spot immediately.
In Moyra Davey’s book of essays, Index Cards, she outlines advice given by a friend: “one is in a state of temporary grace when working hard on one task”. Since my work is so entwined with my life and how I’m feeling, when one is going well, the other usually is too. When things are flowing, it feels like I’ve finally figured it out - everything is clear and connected, lucid, ideas are sparking, my heart feels warm. Davey goes on to describe: “beginning a new phase of reading / writing can be mortifying, but when it takes on momentum, by which I mean it starts to become self-generating, it is one of the greatest highs I know of. I feel taken care of by my unconscious, “held” (in the Winnicottian sense) in a kind of suspended embrace”.
When I first read the passage about being “in a state of temporary grace”, I jotted down something about what the opposite would be, being in a state of temporary ugliness or awkwardness - when things don’t quite fit, don’t make sense, are distant and unenjoyable. When they just aren’t working and doubt settles in. When I read it again for this essay, I noticed that the friend who gave the advice was writer Alison Strayer, whose translation of Annie Ernaux I mentioned in my previous essay, and this is exactly the kind of coincidence that will send ideas bouncing around in my brain again, all bright, balmy and glowy.
In the more specific area of developing film, even if something went wrong, I’d probably only know afterwards, once I’d left the darkroom. During, you’re focused on the task at hand; for half an hour or so there’s a very simple purpose. More tactile, practical elements like this also bring a sense that even failures, or mistakes, can still be enjoyable - as they can’t be changed now they are just part of the work, part of the way things turned out which can create new meaning. Again, it’s something about trust - not a decision but a process, not so much a matter of thinking as one of the body, of gestures - what I’m trying to do feels simple, even when not much else does.
I’ve often asked myself in the past two years what it means to process something, how I can do it. It’s an area of my life where I feel stuck most of the time. I think of my photographic practice as one of the ways in which I try to make sense of things, by giving them shape, physicality, a narrative. Having some iteration of the thing at hand outside of me allows some distance - a bit of what I’m looking at becomes held in the words written and the pile of negatives in my bookcase, in the palette of each image. It provides something to spend time with, to reflect through, to return to and feel the emotions it brings up. But again here things are slow, I find new meanings each time; and when I take a break and come back, the feelings haven’t dulled - only do when I look too much, too often. I wonder if I give photography too much power sometimes, and I might, because of the time when I first came to it.
In both cases, making sense and making work, I know on some level that it’s not something I can force - the pursuit of things that can only happen with time and patience. Quiet hours and rest feel important, even though they’re things I avoid. Being in the darkroom is the only length of time, other than sleep, that I spend in near-silence and dark. And although in a way I’m stuck, can’t leave without ruining my film, I don’t feel it. There’s momentary grace in having a set of gestures to complete, in a certain space, for a certain amount of time, with a certain outcome; there’s comfort in feeling in control. In having a method to follow. There isn’t one to creativity, to taking care of yourself, to growing up and moving on.
Photos ratées:
For the past few months there’s been a file on my desktop called ‘photos ratées’ - ‘ratées’ being the French word meaning not only ‘failed’, but ‘missed’. It’s full of marked, grainy, underexposed images where the physicality of the film, a sense of the medium and its limits came through - but instead of binning them, I kept on collating them, adding them to the file, returning to look. I’d initially chosen not to include my photos ratées, to keep them to hand and maybe do something with them later; but a pause in the work allowed me to reconsider. If I like these images, and if they hold something within them that my other images don’t, are they really failed at all?
I see art as having the potential to hold things - memories, feelings, thoughts, experiences - to help us carry and reinterpret them over time. So when an image comes out too crisp, I’m disappointed: it’s the very lack of blur, of unusual tone, of loss of detail that disappoints. It comes out clearer than memory, but maybe lacking in affect. It doesn’t hold anything. There’s a balance to strike here, but if it’s between a crystal clear, sharp image and a grainy, hard to make out one, while I might keep both to myself, the second will always bring me more joy. ‘It looks like a painting’ is something I’ve heard a lot in the past few months, delivered as a compliment, and one I like to hear - as though my photographs are at their best when they don’t completely look like photographs. The subjectivity put across by slightly-off tones, areas of darkness, blur, brings an emotion that my more technically sound photographs often just don’t have.
The time when these photos ratées started popping up in my negatives was a hazy, confusing one; both in my practice and in my life more generally. Things felt too close and, due to this too-much proximity, unclear. When photographing I leave a lot of room for intuition, allowing myself to photograph things before I know why I’m doing it, making space for things still subconscious to emerge - during that trip home I had the urge to take darker images. When something magical happens in photography, when the emulsion has captured not what your eyes saw but what your heart felt, it can feel comforting: a mirror held up to your experience, that reflects and echoes it. Your feeling has been captured, allowing for you to return to it, reflect on it, and potentially share it with others - it’s nice to be able to hold something up and say ‘this is how it felt then’, to not only hold something inside you but find it out in the world.
A staircase from home takes on a golden hue. It’s always the first image of that place to come to mind now, a corner of the house preserved - as though in amber, soaked in honey, molasses - the third of which I’ve never tried but the word itself sounds like a taste, a texture on the tongue. Molten is a word that came to mind when I returned to this project: a warmth that holds but can get too much, smother. Droplets overlay a bowl of tomatoes, signs of melting, trickling down. This physicality makes the photograph itself more visible as an object. At their darkest, these images signify to me what we see and don't want to show - ‘bad’ images, the limits of what we can manage at any given time, things too personal, too clear; secrets. What can’t fully be said, seen, returned to, remembered.
But imperfections can be the gaps that allow your own experiences to seep into the photograph. When I look at other people’s images, sometimes, they take me to another time and place - and I wonder what that person found in them. A house beyond a lake brings me to a cloudy day in Fontainebleau, a damaged wall reminds me of summers in unfamiliar southern homes, tree trunks deformed by rain take me down to the river near my flat.. Often the images that do this aren’t technically perfect: the tones are a slight yet noticeable shift from reality, icy blue lines pierce polaroids; a corner goes unexposed, small cracks splaying out onto the image, a flower or a web depending on the day I look. A face becomes blurry or, having been exposed five, six times, wholly unrecognisable. There’s something nice about things that remind you of other things, an ongoing conversation, bouncing around as though in a room full of mirrors.
In a passage that often comes to my mind from her memoir The Years, Annie Ernaux evokes moments of rest and lethargy. As translated by Alison L. Strayer, “at these moments she thinks that her life could be drawn as two intersecting lines: one horizontal, which charts everything that has happened to her, everything she’s seen or heard at every instant, and the other vertical, with only a few images clinging to it, spiralling down into darkness”. A more literal translation could be “diving towards the night”: this is what my worst and favourite images are to me - a series of moments just out of reach, gestures to hold close, subterranean and distant as though underwater, diving into darkness, towards the night.