This is a weird, kind of intense story I wasn't sure about sharing... but the people who have seen the photos and heard the story seem pretty blown away, so I'm hoping it will be okay here.
When we were on our trip to Mendocino I shot some film of pretty, rainy trees and things for fun. Some of the films rolls had been around for close to a decade - I was saving certain film types (including Agfa Ultra 50, which is apparently so obscure that I can't even find a good link explaining it to you!) for "a rainy day", and on this trip I realized 1. that it was indeed raining and 2. some of these film stocks had been expired for 8 years. Time to play around!
So I shot some rolls, and upon getting this roll of the aforementioned Ultra 50 back, realized that it had already been partially shot. This sometimes happens if you don't rewind the tail of the film into the canister fully or mark it "shot", so no big deal... at first I just thought I had shot over something I didn't remember shooting, so there are faint flickers of something on this shot of the Mendocino house:
Then I realized what the subject the photos is: a friend of many friends, Dave... who died in the summer of 2008. He's holding his baby daughter, my friend Ava, in the photos, and she just turned 9. So these photos are old!
The weirdest part, to me, is that I never took photos of Dave (I only knew him a bit) - these must have been originally taken by my friend Sara. We used to share a darkroom and a house, so it makes sense that she would've passed along any expired rolls of film she didn't want to me, and didn't remember shooting some frames on this roll. But it was still quite startling to find photos that I never shot, of a friend who had died over a year ago, and on a film stock (50 speed color negative) that you would normally never use for portraiture... it's just too slow, and the colors are too saturated. 
This one is like one of those trompe l'oeil posters... now it's a bed of lavender... now it's Dave reaching out from somewhere... so weird:
What do you think? Do we need more pretty wedding pictures on here?
Sunday, November 22, 2009
double exposures and ghosts
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That happened to me once. Back when I still had a film point-and-shoot, my boyfriend (at the time) borrowed my camera for his summer trip to China. I shot a roll of film before he left, and somehow it didn't get completely wound. He ended up reshooting the entire roll. Some of the double-exposures are funny, some are interesting. The really strange one was where I had shot him in bed reading, and then on the trip he had shot his roommate in the bed, reading...and the two shots ended up in the same frame!
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