boxy (2023) (Patreon)

Posting this one today half because I like it very much with a square crop (which I should do more often, tbh, for reasons I'll get to in a moment) and half because I need the motivation to go throw myself into fixing the other brakes on it, so I can drive far enough to go get more photos of it. We have other cars at the house but this one has that perfect lost-future vibe I want for the project I have living in my head lately. 

Anyway, last night I was playing around with a Mamiyaflex C2, a 6x6 medium-format camera. I was hoping to load it up today and go try it out; it seems like a very different style of shooting due to the fact it's a TLR with a waist finder and I wondered if it would spur any new creativity within me. That line of thought was moot. I broke it trying to get the film out, because I am sometimes very stupid. 

Before I broke it, I got all hyped up to go shoot medium-format; I have two rolls of 120 in my fridge that my friends gave me that I'm dying to use, but now I have to try and fix this thing and honestly the excitement to shoot with it kinda died the minute I broke it. It did make me think, at least, about shooting square. Every time thus far I've done a photographic series/book I've tried to make the cropping a relevant part of the narrative/feel (The Pilgrimage getting exclusively 4:3 and 2.4:1 crops to enhance the cinematic/television Western feel of it; Postcards being actual 4 x 6 images to make it feel more like found media, etc). I wonder what storytelling directions a 1:1 format would take me in; generally, I start with the photos, and then build to a story, so it's possible it would spur ideas I hadn't ever considered before. 

Hopefully, you'll be seeing more squares here soon. In the meantime, this is a good start, and I'm off to fix some brakes.