About 61mm wide. That’s what I’ve discovered shooting 120 film for the first time, from over here in my temporary place to hide, New York.
The analogue scene in Brooklyn is thriving. I live on one of a three block stretch that is yet to be gentrified, and pose myself as the beginning of an unwelcome change. Picture an industrial storage facility turned photography studio turned 3 floors of communal living and the remnants of lighting equipment sprawling out of the cupboards – a filmmaker’s delight. Two days after arriving, I was doing behind-the-scenes on a shoot for a famous magazine in my living room. Living here may be freezing, but it pleases like a piece of Red Velvet cake, which you may want to hit up a Magnolia Bakery for.
Picture the done-up spacious building that I have the privilege of calling home, then juxtapose it with the sound of 5 gunshots outside the front door at just gone 11pm the day after Thanksgiving. I imagine the bullets were meant for someone; that’s how crime works around here. If you’re not a target, you’re relatively invisible. I am, however, reminded of the image of a rat with his head trodden in, left on the central sidewalk for hours, slowly getting beaten further and further into the concrete. I’m sure it’s a symbol of something, but I can’t quite place it at this moment. I ordered Chinese and stepped over the poor creature to avoid a half-drunk/half-mad guy crushing me too. It simply goes on here, unquestioned and fearless. The 7 police cars were remarkably quick to the sound of gunfire and I remember the roommates talked about the sound just that once and never again – we commented that it sounded as if someone were knocking at the door.
Borrowed gloves, Canadian hat, off-grey scarf, padded duffle, I sealed my phone to my ear and spent my international minutes calling up to a vintage camera store hidden in one of the upstairs rooms of an artist’s space in Bushwick, opened only by phone request. You are escorted up several flights of stairs, with white lights trying their hardest to guide you, and engage in small talk which often falls flatly here. We talked of the first snowfall of the year; it’s early. It’s gorgeous, but it’s early. And when I laid my eyes on the Yashica-A that had drawn me there in the first place, I was as good as broke. I took her away with 3 rolls of Kodak Portra (160, 400, expired 400), and an industrial landscape to explore.
My first steps into 120 were arrogant at best. I’ve been working in 35mm for as long as I can remember clicking shutters, and thought the transition would be a piece of that Red Velvet cake I mentioned. Cue a cold splash of severe light leaks and extreme underexposure throughout, aided by my beautiful mistake of using a phone light meter, accentuated by an “I just know it now” attitude which seems to appear rather too frequently in my psyche, and proceeded by an unkempt disregard for the exposed reel post-shooting. I lost a lot of photographs, as is the way when learning something intricate and aged; the camera itself is from the 1960s and clearly has a number of things to teach me about patience and precision.
@Lomogarithm is the new micro-portfolio and project for my 120 film experiments, tentatively having opened my mind to Instagram as an exhibition for photographers. Flickr really betrayed us here. I have ambitions only so far as exposures of 3 for each regular upload – a triangulation of ideas – as that is what will come out from a roll in my early “era”. I came to thinking of the relationship between animals counting in Base 10 (like humans) and Base 12 (like ducks) in mathematics, and how it relates to the number of digits we have, and of logarithmic method in general, hence the concept is woven with that of the popular brand of cameras, who may litigate given my enormous success and profitability.
As either a memory or a prediction of the future, unknowing of which, and something that may play silently in an art gallery, I see now a clockmaker in Crown Heights, just by the Caribbean place that Anthony Bourdain made famous, delicately licking the hands of time onto their denominated figures. We tell the time in base 12, and I often think it’s curious that we tell the time anything at all, given how misleading it can be. And there’s that taco place that gives out legal advice, to prospective divorcees tired of love or lack of it, that advertise both in the window like backlit negatives. I think the dough there must taste of a symbol, but I can’t think of it now.
