vehicle recovery (2023) (Patreon)

I've said in the past that photography fulfills two roles for me. One is artistic. The perfectly-composed, lit, and shot photograph that evokes strong feelings of beauty or awe or fear, etc. Well-planned, well-executed; most of what I share is an attempt at that kind of photography.

The other role, however, is documentarian in nature. What happened in my life? Who are my friends? What do we do when we aren't creating art, but rather when we're just existing? What are the vignettes of my day that I can share that is perhaps more raw than pre-planned art, but feels like a window into an existence that I couldn't share otherwise without writing at length about it? I'm much worse at spontaneity and I shoot very little of this genre, despite constantly wanting to do more of it. 

The former is important to me because I have delusions of being a capital-A artist; the latter is important to me because as a trans woman, these breadcrumbs of casual glimpses into lives of the past are frequently all we have to point to and show as proof that we have always existed, and there are others like us all throughout history. 

This photograph is a rare example of the latter. It is from a day off-roading gone horribly wrong, where our 4Runner overheated due to a blown radiator hose AND got stuck in deep snow at the same time. We hiked six miles back to a road so someone could pick us up, and then we came back two days later with a friend's winch-equipped Jeep to rescue the Toyota. 

This shot is taken on a horrible Sears-branded pump-zoom 24-70mm lens on my Nikon F (which has since broken, sadly). I took it on incredibly-expired Kodak Tri-X 400 pushed to 1600 (because I did a lot of night photography with this same roll). It is horribly grainy and so high-contrast that it shoots more like a memory than an event. I knew it would come out like this when I loaded the roll, and so I shot it very differently than I would on a high-resolution digital camera. I shot to capture a day rather than to take well-composed Art.

And I'm glad I did. Now I have the memory—I have the negative of the memory—and I can preserve that. I wouldn't have taken "Art" that day, but I did show that I was here, and that my friends and I got up to all kinds of adventures, and that feels important.