Shooting film is special, it’s different. There are no shortcuts, no auto mode. Its about judging the amount of light in a scene. It’s time sensitive. As you open the shutter, light begins to collect on the film. The film exposes until you snap the shutter close.
At Arches National Park, I photographed landscapes. After some time of being with the landscapes, I began to feel a relationship between the desert rocks and the film. Both the environment at Arches and film photography both have one element in common: time. I began to try to represent this relationship with time in my work. Instead of photographing trees and plants, I started to focus on the grit and the sedimentation that took hundreds of years to form.
Film photography is also unique because in some sense, it is 3D work. In the darkroom, an enlarger threads light through a film negative which in turn exposes an image onto light sensitive paper. The light exposed from the enlarger does not just simply make the paper turn black, it actually builds upwards while also changing the paper. When you look at film prints, you are actually looking at a photo that has microscopic layers of light layered on top of each other. Sadly, through a computer screen it is impossible to see such effects from the light.
Humans also grow and change with time. Adding human forms to my photographs inserts a conversation about the relationship between humans, light, time, and the environment. Light is a powerful tool! It is something that is all around us everyday. Through film photography and while working in the darkroom, one can physically see light creating art before your very eyes. To me, this is what makes the darkroom such a magical place.
Rachel Wood
thinkingthroughmakingsourcebook 