memento mori (Lat.)

Recently I decided to try getting into 35-mm film photography. Last month I bought a used film camera that’s older than I am,¹ some rolls of film, some batteries, a bag to carry it all in. It’s very cool. I just finished shooting my first roll (the picture above is one of the ones I took).

As a kid, I watched VHS tapes, was recorded by my dad on a large camcorder, helped adjust the antenna on top of the TV, inherited cassette players, learned how to carefully clean a CD, bought disposable Fujifilm cameras to take pictures at summer camp. Sure, these technologies are still around, but they’re no the norm. The ways in which I and my world mediate ourselves to each other, it seemed to teenage me, were granted an invisible, eternal aspect by the likes of the Web, smartphones, streaming, Google. Media’s physicality became obscured behind the gloss of its immediate accessibility and ever more elegant UX. In contrast, learning my way around this analog camera, feeling the kinetic force of the shutter, the physical resistance in the mechanical crank advancing the film for another exposure, has foregrounded the materiality of the image. There’s no instant gratification. Part of analog’s allure is how much patience and intentionality it demands.

I guess I’m feeling nostalgic? Susan Sontag was writing even in 1973 that “it is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia.”² Even as photography is a technology of “fast seeing,” a photo is always “of” the past. The image has an ironic relationship to time.

And so, she says, photography is “an elegiac art, a twilight art.” It’s got me thinking about vulnerability and endings. Apocalypse.

I’ve always lived with anxiety, but perhaps never more so than in the years since leaving the apocalyptic evangelicalism in which I spent, on balance, the vast majority of my life. Transitioning from the paradigm of:

[fated, vile world whose violent end will be curtailed by the infinitely more violent yet somehow beneficent intervention of a totalitarian daddy-emperor]

to that of:

[infinitely beautiful, tragic, multifaceted world that is, however, very much on fire and seemingly just as fated to a death wrought by capital’s cynical greed]

is…extremely tough.

It feels apt to describe the past several years, adapting to life on the other side of the singularity that is evangelical fundamentalism, as a jagged attempt to learn how to deal with the finiteness of existence. To embrace the meaningfulness of the ephemeral and the vulnerable. To set aside notions of perfection and all-or-nothing-ness.

Photography seems to proclaim itself as something that can preserve the present, but the truth is that a photo is a physical object that deteriorates just like the moment it captures, if more slowly. Even before using the film I store it in my freezer so as to halt its inevitable degradation due to heat, but even that won’t stop the gradual effects of ambient gamma radiation.

Sontag says that photos are by nature memento mori, small testaments to the finitude of existence:

Seems like an appropriate hobby for the ending of a world.

1  A Minolta XG-A with a kit 50-mm lens, if you’re interested. From what I can glean, it’s less well-featured than its sibling models, with fewer manual controls, but it’s still hella neat.

2  I think it’s probably uncontroversial—even cliché—to point out that our capitalist dystopia has come to rely on nostalgia as a necessary ingredient to its continued functioning.

3  Has there been any “faster seeing” than that of digital photography, especially when mediated through the social feed?