The Analog Life

lessons from film, metaphors, photos, and Venice

I’m often asked, ‘why film?’ It makes little sense, really. It is expensive and the margin of error is huge. I recently got a film back without a single decent shot, the entire roll was grey and washed out, as if the film was faulty or the camera’s light meter failed. It is crushing when that happens.

What I love about film could be read as a metaphor for my philosophy of life.

There is poetry in a world without clear answers, and it is also a spinning Dervish of chaos. We ache to know the end of the story yet we attempt to live well with the not knowing. We try to control everything yet, when we fail, we find a swooping surrender to the elements that toss and turn us. We digest everything around us, with little thought, but it is the singular, the moments, the feeling of being struck by beauty that stay with us. We move as fast as we consume, yet it is only by slowing down and pausing that we catch the details. The details are where we are found.

When we don’t know we learn. When we listen we notice. When we make mistakes or fail we swallow the disappointment and move on.

Film is light touched gently in the moment of capture. It is choosing to spend on what is precious, not disposable. It is looking with intention.

It is turning something fleeting into something permanent, yet fragile. It is making tangible what could be destroyed. It is carefully handling the delicate, with hope. It is trusting it will be ok, when we never really know.

It is a return to an analogue time, with fewer distractions, a time of smudged ink and cassette tapes that unwind into a snaking celluloid mess. It is the sound of a scratched record, a recorded answering machine, days when you could not be found or traced. When we sat at bus stops and looked at clouds or opened creased paperbacks because we didn’t have anything else to do. When we wrote letters and licked stamps. When we had to use our hands to wind and unwind and carefully file negatives in sheets of soft plastic, hold pictures in our hands when we excitedly picked them up from the camera shop. It takes us back to a slower time, the antithesis of a high speed digital world.

Most of all, film is honest. It is what it is, warts, bumps, streaks and all. It shows up and says here I am, with all my faults and textures, this is me.

I am reading The Master by Colm Toibin which is an imagined telling of the interior life of Henry James. I read these words about Venice:

“Once he had arrived in Venice and night fell, he knew that neither tourist nor time had harmed the city’s mixture of sadness and splendour… the other side of Venice appeared-the raw sumptuousness, the shameless glitter, the spaces so out of scale with actual need…Venice was laden down with old voices, old echoes and images; it was the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts.”

Venice is my secret magic place. It is where I dream of taking a sabbatical, wandering the damp, erie and painfully beautiful coiled pathways. Crossing bridges and looping so far out of the centre, you feel you are lost. It is steeped in history, blood, wanderlust and trade. In my 6 visits I have always felt pulled under its spell. But my Venice would have to be seen in the darker lonely months, when the city comes back to its own. There is no better medium for Venice than film.

Finally, two photos of Tokyo, my other city of dreams. Here preserved on film.

There is a game my family likes to play with new friends. We ask this question: what would you study if you had 6 weeks to learn a new skill, at the end of which you would be accomplished. Answers range from tennis, to dressmaking, to pottery, pastry chef, magician, furniture maker, oil painter. It gets straight to the heart of what matters to people, to what interests them. I said I would like to learn how to use a dark room. The last time I did it I was 15.

What would you say?

Thank you for reading, Sam x

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