There’s a particular kind of magic that comes from forgetting where you are — not physically, but photographically. That’s part of why I love shooting 35mm film on my Kodak Ektar H35. (Boy, did that sound like a commercial…or what?)
The camera’s half-frame format splits a standard 36-exposure 35mm roll into 72 17mm-images, and that simple doubling shifts everything. When I get my pics back from the lab, each one made ends up married to another — a diptych dictated not by concept or sequence, but by time, accident, and the peculiar rhythms of life. Separated by a thick, black line. I almost forgot to mention the beautiful, lo-fi quality, too — from the camera itself to the pictures it makes.
I’ll go hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months between frames. I’ll shoot one image and then forget about it. Life moves. I move. And when the roll finally finishes and I develop it? There’s often a surreal, poetic dissonance waiting for me: a stranger in hot pink fur next to a tiny dog in a red Adirondack chair. I made that picture hours apart in a day spent in NYC. But different moods. Different places. And the same frame.
What I love about this format isn’t the economy — though that’s part of it. It’s the randomness, the surprise. The way memory, film, and time get scrambled into something new. It’s like flipping through a stranger’s photo album and finding out it’s yours.
More soon (who knows when!), as I keep working my way toward another 72 in the can to drop at my local film lab.
