When would you guess these photos were taken? With film photography and a subject as timeless as Paris, it can be difficult to tell. All you need to do is pick detail shots or avoid a close look at cars and people and it can be really hard to make out the difference between decades or weeks ago. These were actually taken a year ago and I had published them much earlier, but they took some time developing.
Before I went to Paris a year ago, I pondered for some time about which camera to take (as one does) and finally decided to leave the DSLR at home in favour of the old Rolleiflex and a small and handy digital camera. I feared I would resent taking the Rolleiflex, afraid of missing to eternalise a moment or wasting too much time checking exposure and changing films. In the end I resented taking the small digital camera. I hardly ever used it and if I did, the pictures seemed boring and lifeless. Today, I would use a camera phone in case I needed to take a quick snapshot, carrying two cameras around all day is definitely not for me. However, I never regretted using the film camera. Does it slow you down on your way to go hunting for sights? Definitely, but in a good way. It makes you stop an look, really look at what you’re seeing, waiting for the clouds or the people to pass, going back a few steps, plotting double exposure or possibly even just deciding on not taking the picture at all. If film photography teaches you anything after all, it’s patience. Granted, it might not stop you from taking more than one picture of the Eiffel tower, but it definitely stops you from taking ten, saving you from the hassle of either deleting most of them afterwards or letting them overcrowd your external hard drive. So if you can’t decide to take your film cameras with you on holiday, I would strongly recommend it.
What I wouldn’t recommend, however, is to have your films developed via the cheap drug stores. I might have known better than to hand in three films with a subject that you don’t get to repeat easily. The first film was ready about a week later, the second one took a week more and was scattered with lints and something that looked oddly botanical and could not be removed. Also, someone had stapled right through Sacré Cœur. When I looked inside the envelope of the third film, I found pictures of a friendly looking elderly couple and their garden. Nice photos, mind, but not the ones I had hoped for and definitely none I had ever taken. So I sent them back to the laboratory along with a request for my actual pictures, describing them as “medium format” and “Paris in spring”. I was given a number to call and ask if my pictures had been found. I called regularly for some weeks, without success, chiding myself for not giving them to a local laboratory in the first place and eventually I forgot about the pictures. In late summer the note with the phone number fell into my hands again and I was about to throw it away, but decided to call one last time. I actually got lucky! I could hardly believe when I finally looked at my pictures. The subject was probably the very reason that my pictures had been found at all. So after scanning and cleaning them up, it didn’t feel right to publish them in autumn and so I took the long way round and waited a few months more. If film photography teaches you anything after all, it’s patience.
