This isn't what it used to be

My dad gave me his old camera. He taught me how to develop black and white film in the wash kitchen in the basement. I use a bin bag and a jumper I wear the wrong way round to keep the light away when rolling the film onto the spools. That is to say, I put the bin bag in the jumper, and put my arms through the sleeves starting at the wrists.

I find it strangely relaxing. In a fast world it's sometimes nice to go slow, to occupy the hands fully with a task that takes time and cannot be rushed.

These are some of the first pictures I took:

Every picture felt like it was taken under water. There was something ancient about them, as if they had been recovered from a sunken wreck.

I doodled little drawings with a coloured pencil on a piece of paper, scanned them to get digital copies, and used a image manipulation program to make the drawing white on a transparent background. I then overlaid these to make the composites.

Walking through the woods felt like I was walking through Eden.

The pipes in the wash kitchen came alive when I was developing. Eleven minutes is a long time to wait when you count every second.

All of these are the hands of people I know. I can almost see their personalities better in the way they gesture their hands than I can in the way they use their face.

Nothing looked the same through the lens. I thought maybe with practice I could capture what I see. I took photos of all the things I knew well, to try and preserve the memory I had of them. None of them came out with the same feeling. I thought the camera was changing them.

The camera did what it was built to do. It changed nothing. The things themselves had changed.