The Lived Collective

My boyfriend got me a Polaroid camera for Christmas and my parents got me a film slide scanner to turn film into digital files.

Allow me to reveal my former ignorance, I thought the film scanner would take the film straight from of the camera and digitize it. Allow me now to cure your ignorance before you embarrass yourself like I did, film is still and will always be a chemical process. However, the conversation with my dad about that process and the Polaroid camera grabbed a hold of me and has yet to let go.

Stepping back a bit, I gave up social media of all kinds about nine months prior to this Christmas. I’ll spare you the sermon on the ills of social media. I am confident there is already something inside of you that knows and craves a different life.

That being said, I learned to deeply value presence, in myself and in others. I had to relearn the art of being bored and I remembered a saying my dad used to tell us as kids, “you are not bored, you are boring”. Said in jest, it rings truer now than ever. Are we really all willing to say collectively that the most interesting thing about our lives is the curated half-truth we see on the screens of our phones? I dare you to sit in uncomfortable stillness and reclaim it as your own. We ponder over why we don’t feel alive and in awe or hear the voice of God but perhaps it’s because we are never quiet and open enough to see and hear. Only in quiet stillness, that is all but nonexistent in most of our lives nowadays, will we find the peace and calm our weary hearts and minds need.

Enter film.

I wanted a way to capture special things, people, and places in a pure way. I wanted to be able to go for a hike without my phone and still capture memories and places, I wanted a way to remember without the remembering robbing me of ever living the experience in the first place. Knowing your photos will never be posted on social media sure changes the way you take them. From the first slide of Polaroid film that teased its way out of my new camera, I was hooked. Holding the first photo, I could see in it the life that was happening in the frame, there was grain, imperfect light, and dogs blurring the slide with their Christmas excitement; and my people, each one of them looked perfectly as themselves, they were stunning in a way that editing out imperfections never will be.

I can’t really explain how special it is to be known and loved by the right person, I just pray you experience it one day. My boyfriend immediately observed and deeply understood the joy I had just found. In his proxy excitement, he found an old Canon T50 35mm film camera he had purchased at around 12 years old from a sweet old couple. She hadn’t seen the light of day in about 20 years but trusting that things were just “built to last” back then he popped in a fresh set of AA batteries, ran as fast as he could to the closest Walgreens (no judgment, it’s all we had on short notice), and loaded the camera up. He has years of digital photography experience and is extremely talented but instead of lecture and labor the nuance of photography, he handed me the camera and in not so many words said “rotate here until what you want is in focus” and away I went. That’s the thing about him, he would have let me waste the entire roll of film, as long as I enjoyed the process. I asked questions along the way, of course, and he was happy to help but he mostly let me play and in playing I finally found an art form that sparked joy and creativity in me.

Recently, I was sharing some photos I had just developed with my mom. She has a stunning back yard curated for beauty and peace and unbeknownst to her a wonderful place to cut your teeth taking photos. She asked innocently, “why the sudden interest in photography?”

I explained it wasn’t photography so much that captivated me, but film photography in particular. There is a purity in taking a photo and it being instantaneously imprinted onto the film; the moment quite literally set in stone (microscopic crystals to be accurate). A digital camera can hide and correct and purify, the art of digital photography has become more about postproduction editing skill than anything else, if you have enough pixels and information to work with you can bring just about anything about of a photograph. None of that to diminish digital photography and the people who prefer that medium, all of this to simply highlight a few differences. There is also something about how digital images are too artificial and our eyes know it. They have been so perfected, we sucked the actual life out of the image, and our brains pick up on this in a subconscious way. I challenge you to grab a disposable camera or buy a Polaroid camera and tell me you don’t feel more when looking at those images than you do looking at your perfectly curated, AI edited Instagram grid.

Maybe I am setting out on a fool’s errand trying to explain a feeling. Or maybe your heart was already longing for something more real in a hyper digitized and therefore increasingly disordered and disconnected world. I willing to bet on the latter.

I am not trying to sell you on becoming a film photographer, but I would be dishonest if I said I wasn’t trying to sell you on reclaiming your humanity. This is not a sermon on quitting social media or giving up ChatGBT in your daily life, if that is how this comes across, then I will regret having wrote it. This is, however, a plea to give up a life of instant gratification and doom scrolling for a life fully lived.

I cannot think of a more devastating life than one that comes to it’s end only to find it was never really lived at all.

Be present with people and with silence. Go put yourself in the way of beauty and dare to just let it be. Reclaim your mind and let peace fill it again.