Three years ago my son grabbed and dropped my Contax T2 35mm camera.
I remember buying it, with its prestigious Carl Zeiss lens emblazoned on the front for all my photography friends to admire. Buying one can run anywhere from $600-$1,000 online today. I honestly don’t remember how much I paid for mine back then, but I do know that it was in that pre-baby phase of my life when I treated a new piece of equipment like my baby, and this one in particular still holds a nostalgic reverence in my hand.
Even though…it’s broken.
At first I thought it was a glitch when I got the film scans back, not wanting to admit what I knew was true- I had let my new baby break my old baby. I spoke with the owner of the lab who develops my film (I miss the darkroom of my college days) and he said I should take it to be evaluated by a repair shop. I took it to a place called “Authorized Camera Repair” (who could contend with that name?) and I remember how 3 employees gathered around my camera, and the crestfallen way they looked at me when they said it couldn’t be fixed. It was like General Hospital: Film Camera Edition.
Simply put: the mechanism that moves the film forward had been broken during the fall, so instead of advancing the film a full frame’s worth after every click of the shutter it only advanced it a portion of that, leading to the unintentional overlapping of images: think diptych meets double exposure. I had never seen anything like it.
I wasn’t going to get rid of the camera, so I just kept shooting family life scenes with it.
My husband and I came to love the surprises they brought, and the dream-like feel, of the images, particularly because they mirrored how our days actually FELT. We had three babies in 3 years, and this camera documented the silliness and messiness of day-to-day life at home in that kind of chaos, and in the end I actually preferred these images over the digital ones. After the first kid, I stopped shooting digital altogether. I didn’t have time to cull and edit them- I was like the housepainter who didn’t want to paint his own house. I hired other photographers for the digital stuff, and in between I just shot film.
Here’s where the story changes…
Last summer I was approached by a fashion and lifestyle influencer to do an anniversary photoshoot for her and her husband.
She was asking for experimental photographs, blurry, imperfect shots, nothing like the clean work that most people pay me for. So, I said yes.
I brought literally every kind of camera I owned to this shoot- I resembled a pack-mule with all 8 of them strapped to me, jutting out of various pockets, an organized chaos so that I could switch from 35mm to medium format (film sizes) to Polaroid to digital for backup. And of course, I brought the Contax. I felt like I was breaking some imaginary rule. I had never taken client images with it, but I knew that if I was going to give it a try this was my chance. They loved them. They got attention on Instagram, and it led to my first ever request to shoot a wedding hybrid (film and digital together).
Being hired to shoot film has been a dream of mine for awhile. From the first photos I ever took at age 13 on a disposable cameras from CVS, to choosing one of the few colleges still offering a hybrid photography program, to keeping a film camera with me at all times even now at 31 years old, film photography has been a part of the way I see the world for over half my life.
So, who knows, maybe this is the year I’ll shoot more client work on film. Maybe this is the year I start shooting Super 8 (don’t know what that is? Check here). Maybe this is the year that I will FINALLY sit down with my entire archive (and probably cry, and write) and maybe design that album I've been putting off for the last 5 years of motherhood.
I think-perhaps- this email today has been a start.
