It’s funny how the creative process develops and we never know where it takes you once you’ve started.
I’ve been working on blending the images taken with my mobile phone inside the DLR and the time-lapse images taken from my balcony and as I work on it more and more ideas come to mind – specially, because in the mean time I’ve been taking two online courses on the subject of film via the FutureLearn website:
- The Business of Fim with The Open University and the BFI.
- Digital Storytelling with the University of Birmingham
So thinking about film, its industry, language and all the things involved in film making has inevitably led me to think about the analogue film photography process.
For almost a year, I’ve been also working on revisiting an old project, Film Waste, commemorating 10 years since I last looked at the subject of film vs digital in photography. I’ve always thought my many different projects couldn’t really be clearly co-related. I never saw how they could represent a cohesive body of work apart from the fact that they all, in a way or another, talk about mundane things, everyday objects. But since I started Platform – Spring I feel I can see a closer co-relation between these two works: I think they are very experimental and the latter is allowing me to work more freely, without bothering too much with what things mean but instead on how they feel or look – in a similar way I work with the Film Waste project.
Platform – Spring (film still)
As I was working on more blending and thinking more and more about how this new project relates to the Film Waste one, I got this incredible email from a very dear curator/collector I’ve known for many years:
Dani,
The other day I changed around some art work on my walls.
I placed the one I have of you: the small piece of film (red and black) on white background in my dining room.
Since I know my wife is a little reactionary about art, I knew I had to sell her your piece with a title. Given her partiality towards analog photography, I thought quickly and I said, as I was hanging it, “It is called Requiem for Analog Photography” by Dani Tagen.
She bought it with delight.
Then I thought: “Maybe that is what that series is all about.”
Best,
Fernando
Such a sweet email, perfect timing and what a great title! Of course, Film Waste series – or should I now call it “Requiem for Analog Photography”? – has always been a comment on the overtaking of analogue photography by the digital one. I’ve always been concerned with the disappearance of the photographic medium and now Platform – Spring gives me a chance to talk about how film makes us behave in a different way, how it allow us to use the mishaps or the adversities to our own gain. Pity I’m shooting with digital, but we have to start somewhere, right?!
Anyway, Platform-Spring has been a hard making process so far. I’m blending the images frame by frame and am allowing my daily insights to take over. The problem is that these insights change a lot and sometimes I’m happy with a good part of the film then I take a break – a week or more – and when I come back I don’t like everything I see, just some bits so I start changing again the bits I don’t like.
I’ve always tried to be very disciplined and analytical…maybe trying to be too practical, but this time I want it to be different. I want to get out of my comfy zone. I can’t complain that’s a hard process actually as I just do what I feel it is right, the only problem is that I’m not used to not having my own deadlines so I feel I can work on this particular part of the project for ages.
I guess the only way out now is to keep doing it, blending and discarding and then blending more images again until I’m fully satisfied with the full video. You’ll just have to bear with me.
