Pig Sty Avenue

An ex-smoker has a few drinks too many one evening in the convivial company of a smoker, cadges one, buys a pack of ten the next day, and the next a pack of twenty, and there they are, re-hooked. I am told that heroin works in a similar way. And I can tell you that so does photography, no matter how many years you've been away from it. My particular obsession right now is "film inside" searching eBay for old cameras with that phrase in their description. I got started on this back in 2009.   I think it got a hold of me when I developed these photos of the Queen Mary and the photographer's family near Southampton. Someone takes photos on holiday or of a historic event. They don't finish the roll so the camera goes in a drawer, life intervenes and it's forgotten there. When these films get developed you get a glimpse into a forgotten holiday. Before they get developed, the possibilities are endless. And the decades have changed the chemistry of the film in ...

It's taken me since early 2008 to get around to this. At last, this past weekend, I've learned how to develop and print photos properly thanks to Street Level Photoworks & our tutor Alicia Bruce . On Saturday morning it was the basics of how an SLR works, (you can see my hands in the bottom right of the first photo, here , and my Nikon F in the second one); then we went out and took photos. In the afternoon we developed the negs. None of this was new to me, but it was still useful to go through it all again, professionally. I didn't let on, for example, that I've never used stop bath, I've always just got by with washing up liquid. The negs dried over night, and on Sunday we went into the darkroom with the enlargers and this is all new to me now. It got really paradoxical: making a test strip, contact sheet, and then the actual print was all pretty straightforward, once you get the hang of obvious no-nos like leaving the photographic paper out of the box, ...