Film Photography

Held in Solution

Held in Solution is a series exploring the building of memories, memories flowing and changing from the passage of time, the forgetting of memory due to age or disability, and the fear of forgetting. As a disabled artist who struggles with memory problems and has a family history of dementia, I use my artistic practice to emote these feelings surrounding my tumultuous experience with memory. By using an experimental photographic practice called film souping, I create visual representations of memory. The solutions I create to soup each individual film roll typically correspond in some way to the specific memory captured by the film. I purposely blur the lens when capturing each frame to cause a hazy look for conceptual and technical reasons.

Conceptually, the hazy nature of each image is meant to represent the struggle of fully remembering a memory. It’s as if one was to forget to put on their glasses in the morning, everything is soft and blends together. You may find comfort in this or distress.

Technically, the purposeful blurring of the lens and image is meant to highlight the colours and swirls brought out in the souping process. Souping the film causes the film layers to break down; the different dye layers blending together to create the beautiful swirls of colour overtop of the image. At the heart of this work is an attentiveness to unfocused sources of light — the way light behaves when it is felt rather than seen clearly. It is in this softness that the poetics of light reveal themselves most honestly, not as something to be captured sharply, but as something to be held, however briefly, before it slips away.