New Roll / On Unraveling Shame and Archiving Negatives (Patreon)

This is still my February backlog; I shot an unbelievable amount in Jan/Feb. I've slowed down a bit, but the work I did in those months will likely form the backbone of my upcoming gallery, so it was worth it. This is more "Fuji" 400 through the Nikon N60.

As usual, here's the zipped folder on Google Drive, and the ever-growing gallery on Flickr.

This weekend, I finally tackled a bunch of projects that I have been putting off for ages. One of these projects was negative archival. To do this, I unwrap my plastic-wrapped developed rolls of film, trim them down to strips of five, and slide them into PVC-free plastic sleeves. I label them and throw them in a dark folder to (hopefully) preserve for a few decades.

I always get my negatives back from the labs - that's why I shoot film, ostensibly, to have a physical record of my photographs - but I have been behind on archiving them for an embarrassingly long time.

I get into bad feedback loops with slow-burn unimportant tasks like this. If they don't get completed quickly, I am embarrassed to have left them for as long as I have, and the shame keeps me from actually facing the project. Then the work piles up, and the shame grows. Eventually, even thinking about the task overwhelms me, and tackling it guarantees a panic attack.

My negatives are hardly the only part of my life this phenomena has manifested. I have been trying for a decade to complete all of the tasks I need to as an adult, and I cannot. There is no point in my life where I have ever been satisfied with how much I was doing, but it's only gotten worse as I approach 30 and my mental health is shakier. I find myself with very limited bandwidth, and while I was working, I was spending virtually all of it just getting myself to sit still at my desk. There was no bandwidth left to live.

I was also ashamed of this.

When I quit my job, it was a two-part admission. One: yes, I have limited bandwidth. Shameful or not, I have to at least recognize it.

Two: at this time in my life, I want to use that limited bandwidth on living my life. Spending that bandwidth on reviewing cars no longer felt like a good place to invest it, even though being an auto journalist was such an important part of my self-conception.

Quitting my job has left me sad, to be sure. Admitting that I had changed my priorities and I do have limited bandwidth did something strange to the shame: it lessened.

So with more bandwidth and less shame, I started, at last, to tackle my negatives. As I sat there, carefully trimming the rolls to fit in the plastic archival sleeves, I asked: Why was I ashamed of letting this unimportant task sit?

My shame, I think, also stemmed from a contradiction in my mind I had never resolved: this unimportant task is important to me. I feel achingly stupid to admit it, but if my apartment were on fire and I needed to make a split-second decision, my photography—these negatives—would be the only non-living thing I'd grab.

I am aware, intellectually, that my photography is not important. There is plenty of documentation of what Seattle looks like currently and the odds of my work amounting to anything over the long run are nil. The Earth is burning to the ground and America is collapsing. In the grand scheme of things, my photos are irrelevant.

To admit that leaving my negatives sitting in my closet was neglecting something important would be admitting that I thought my photography was important, and I did not want to admit that.

And yet as I went through the zen-like process of unwrapping negatives, carefully trimming them, sliding them into the archival sheets, I realized how incredibly much I value these negatives.

There's my engagement. There's our Thanksgiving. There's the day I felt bad about something and walked ten miles. There's my city. There's my home. There's my cat.

My negatives are not just a physical archive of my work, they are a tangible representation of my life.

Here, in this black binder full of negatives, is the record of my life! It is unimportant and trivial in the way that everyone's life is unimportant and trivial, which is to say that it is sacred and beautiful. With the contradiction resolved, I joyously archived for hours on end, enjoying re-examining my photographed existence.

I hope that I can apply this realization to other aspects of my life. I want to use this breather from my work to become a better person. I want to realize all the ways I already was a good person, and internalize them. I want to get my archives completed and treat my photography with the importance it truly has to me. I want to live like it matters again; too much in the past year has made me feel as though my life is meaningless.

Even if there is no meaning, even if it is unimportant, it can still matter.

Vicki