Using analog photography to tell stories words can’t.
By Maya Modelli
A photo begins as an idea, a feeling. Then it is about waiting, waiting for the perfect moment for that feeling to come to life in the viewfinder, with the steady tick of the advance lever and a blink of the shutter, that moment is caught on a little plastic ribbon. From there, it is rewound and bathed in a series of chemicals, all perfectly tempered at 68℉. Then, that little moment, if it was captured just right, gets brought to the darkroom, and placed in an enlarger where a lightbulb will switch on, projecting the image onto a sheet of light-sensitive paper. The moment that paper gets fully submerged into the developer the image starts to appear. The photo becomes a window to that initial feeling of a moment.
I don’t think I will ever tire of the magical feeling of watching an image appear on a blank sheet of paper.
On my thirteenth birthday, Chris, our neighborhood Facebook page’s admin who had the biggest beard I have ever seen, gave me an old leather bag containing an Olympus OM-1 35mm camera, two lenses, and some film that he had lying around.
Being 12 in 2015 meant that I was occupied with Snapchat filters, John Green, and Lana del Rey. There was something about the OM-1 that intrigued me, something mysterious about a little metal box that didn’t need anything but film to make a photo. I remember shooting a roll of film with 12 frames (all of which were no doubt improperly exposed), and then not knowing what to do, how to get the film out, or what the next step was. I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom with the blinds closed and opening the camera back and pulling the little ribbon of film out of my camera and watching it curl on the floor in front of me. I gave up. The Olympus OM-1 was older than me, wiser than me, and I didn’t want to listen to it.
The OM-1 lived on my bookshelf until I picked it up during my freshman year of high school. It was a time when I kept the blinds drawn in my bedroom all day. Whether justified or not, I felt as though everyone around me resented me and was burdened by me. I wondered if life was worth living. I enrolled in a darkroom photography class. Deep down I knew that I needed something that would tether me to this life, something that would permit me to connect to the world around me. I knew it had to start with my family.
In 2018 my family and I were visiting my aunt in D.C. We went to the National Gallery where Sally Mann’s ‘A Thousand Crossings’ was being shown. It was a series Mann shot at her summer house as her children were growing up. I fell in love with her photos. My dad led me through the exhibit. Slipping between words in Portuguese and English, he described what they meant to him. I had never seen photos that made me feel so much.
His favorite photo was called “The Ditch,” a photo of her son lying in a hole dug into the sand on a beach surrounded by other children. As my father described his his emotional identification with the photos, I felt both closeness with him and an immense guilt. I felt guilty that I was enjoying time with my father knowing that he was having an affair with another woman – something I had only recently discovered, my mother didn’t know, something he didn’t know I knew.
Shortly after seeing those photos, I told them both what I knew.
My father and I have never been good at communicating our emotional states with words. Beyond the facts, the stories of the events in my father’s life, the only things I ever learned about him -the very essence of his being- came from looking at and talking about photos. For us, it has always been about what isn’t said.
Around two years later, after the weeknight couples therapy had begun to heal the fractures in my parents relationship and after the guilt I felt began to subside, my father pulled up a photo by Sebastião Salgado, a photo he took of Serra Pelada. “This photo will mean different things to different people,” my father said. “It will mean something different to me than it does to you, Quando eu vejo esta foto, me dá vontade de chorar. For me this photo makes me want to cry. Jubinha, these are a people who are hungry.”
When I take a photo, I listen to the story the light has to tell. I move, hold, and bend that light so other people can listen too.
The blinds in my bedroom are always open now.