Twenty Twenty Goddamned Five: Backstory

content warning: this post has mentions and discussions of suicide and death.

god, where to start. january, i guess.

Part One: The End

to start this post on the right note, at the beginning of january my sister took her own life. she hadn't been doing well, with various physical and mental health issues taking the ultimate toll. still, i didn't realise how bad it was and the phone call from her boyfriend on the 2nd of january informing me she'd been taken to hospital knocked me for six. sister's boyfriend drove up from manchester immediately to come and collect me, and we drove overnight in the freezing fog back to manc. the photo above was taken as he took a few moments to sleep in the car. i wandered around outside in the biting cold and took that photo of a petrol station. it's all i could do.

my sister, laura, finally passed on the 8th of january, and to say that a part of me died with her is not hyperbole. i felt like my world had come to an end in a small and very real way. 

you have to understand; in september 2023, my wonderful stepdad jack was rushed to hospital and died shortly after due to sepsis. a month later, we lost my mother's beautiful dog tia. speed along to may 2024, and my mother - a long time chain smoker - went into hospital too after a bad fall; she was scanned and prodded and told she had lung cancer, and died just over a week later. 

being that myself and laura were the sole executors, the admin related to my mother's death fell on us. probate is a long and painful and drawn out process; we had to sort out the clear out and sale of her house, we had to organise all of her debts and expenses. we learned a lot of stuff about our mum after she'd died that we'd not known before. and when i say probate's a long process, we still haven't settled the estate nearly 2 years later.

now we had to sell a house, organise a cremation, scatter the ashes, and deal with closing bank accounts and paying off debts. it was a lot. and laura being the primary executor, she had to do so much, on top of her health issues and trying to hold down a job.

then, in october 2024, laura lost her truest and best friend in the world, her nervous old dog hamish. i fully believe that if he'd lived, so would she.

so for context; in just over a year, we lost both dogs, and both parents. i will always understand laura's desperate final decision, even as i hate it with all the power in the universe. i still haven't processed my mother's death; that's a thing for therapy. but laura? i loved her with all my heart. and just under a year later, i still can't believe she's not there any more. i can't just call her up and shoot the shit for an hour, or send her funny memes and animal news (she was a veterinary nurse, a job she adored). instead there's this void. 

Part Two: The Beginning

where in the name of all that is good and holy do i go from there? well past!me might have fallen back down into a bottle or a handful of pills with very few regrets; but that's past!me. present!me has been sober for a decade and despite knowing that, i doubt anybody on earth could condemn me for doing such things.

what does this have to do with film photography, i hear you (all none of you) ask? i mean, god cos, this is a depressing post already. stick to camera talk why don't you?

well, here it is: i'm autistic and have adhd. when i focus on a thing - a hobby, a book, a film, a videogame - i hyperfocus. why focus on something when you can devote your entire life to it instead? i mean, is that healthy? well, that's a moving target. all i know is that i needed something, i needed a creative outlet. you know if you've read this blog that i paint pictures of space, and i've also been doodling and writing and illustrating comics since i was a very wee thing; i've not felt inspired enough to pick up my drawing tablet in many months, but little did i know that photography was waiting for me this whole time.

a) Diane Arbus

in 2023, just before learning of my stepdad's death (my mum told me on my last day of the holiday), me and my beloved, dylan, went to spend a week with their mums in their homeland, shetland. i loved the entire trip, from the 12 hour overnight ferry trip (sleeping as your body is swooshed from side to side is a hell of an experience, as is sitting on the smoking deck at 2am in the pitch dark; the notion of liminal space was coined specifically for this, i'm sure of it) to seeing the gorgeous, glorious unspoilt landscapes of those windswept isles.

i had a wonderful time in shetland; i'd taken my trusty Nikon Coolpix L480 bridge camera so i could take bird photos; prior to this trip i'd seen the camera laura had and bought myself one. it's a great little camera - a bridge between a digital compact and a full on slr, with a dedicated Bird Mode wherein the camera calculates aperture and takes a bunch of pics in burst mode when you hold down the shutter. great for birds! prior to this trip, that's all i used this camera for, just taking photos of the garden birds. which i did, and still do. a lot. 

so yeah, i took the camera to shetland with me in the hopes i'd see some cool birds and maybe get some nice shots of the scenery. that was until myself and dylan had time to kill after arriving in lerwick before their mum came to pick us up. being a tourist, and accompanied by a local who hadn't lived in shetland for many years, we wandered into the shetland museum and gallery.

i love museums in general, and seeing all these exhibits memorialising the history of shetland was fantastic. if you ever get a chance to learn about shetland, you should take it. it's a fascinating place with a rich human history dating back to the bronze age. but that's not what got me; instead, we headed to the art gallery where they were showcasing an exhibition on diane arbus.

i'd heard the name before, in a videogame of all things (more on that later). two characters in the game were discussing diane arbus' command of capturing the human condition in black and white. they mentioned tortured faces and seeing humanity as tortured. i was intrigued, so in we went. what we saw couldn't be further from those characters' discussion if they tried.

i'm not here to discuss arbus' politics or the ethics around those photos. instead, what we saw were people we'd never expected to see. disabled people, people of all races and colours, queer and trans people; all people we'd never have expected to see in photos dating back to the 60s. we saw ourselves in those photos. these weren't 'hopeless faces' - these were people that nobody else would think to immortalise in film, especially back in the 1960s. the media today talks about how trans lives are a new phenomenon, and here we saw, in pristine black and white, just how bollocks that was. queer people have always been here, and we always will.

i left that exhibition feeling completely inspired. i wanted to use my camera for more than just nature photography - though i'll still forever want to do that too. i wanted to use my camera to make art.

so, armed with this inspiration, i decided to do just that. 

are these groundbreaking works of art? of course not (though, the top one of the trails in the sand was featured in the Shape exhibit at the Glasgow Gallery of Photography (you can see my image along with all the other entries here if you like!) in september this year). but they triggered something in me. spurred me on to try and see the artistic merit in the environment around me.

when we got back home from shetland, it was kind of a weird time; as i mentioned, i was informed of my stepdad's death on my last day in shetland. as soon as we got back home, i had to travel down to manchester to be with my mother and be there for when my sister returned home from a holiday of her own. it was a weird time to say the least. thoughts of photography were put on hold indefinitely while grief took up most of my bandwidth. it wasn't until around a year later, at the release of a videogame of all things, that i got back into it.

b) Life Is Strange

so i've gone into my love of this videogame before in my first post about lomography, so i'll try not to retread old ground; the tl;dr is that this game is clearly made by a team who love photography - from max's compulsion to take images, to the game's appearance - showing light leaks and film burn on loading screens for example - to the well researched lectures your photography teacher gives you in the game. photography is such an intrinsic part of the game that max's camera is almost a main character in and of itself. to say this game changed my life is not an exaggeration; i identified so strongly with max's best friend chloe that i dyed my own hair blue and haven't stopped since.

anyway, the reason i mention this is because another studio picked up the game and made a sequel.

c) Double Exposure

so... i'm just gonna say it. this was not a good game. divorced from the original creators of that first game, this one was empty, hollow, devoid of anything real. it felt like a cheap facsimile, a cynical cash grab for players with nostalgia for the previous game released 9 years prior. instead of being made with a love for the medium of photography, this game was choc full of product placement for anything from Polaroid to Dr. Marten boots. look kids! you can dress like max! you'll have to take out a mortgage for the privilege but that's a you problem.

but i'm not here to discuss the merits and complaints of a videogame on a film photography blog. one thing that intrigued me about the game was the name. until this game was released i'd never heard the term "double exposure." in the run up to the game's release, when the hype was at its strongest (and believe me, i was hyped, i really, really wanted to love this game), i looked into the polaroid camera the studio was flogging. an instant camera where you could take double exposures (ie, two photos on the same frame). colour me interested!

the link i posted earlier (that you can click here instead of scrolling back up, because i'm nice like that) has me talking a bit about this, but basically, i found my way back to lomography when i found out they had made an instant camera of their own, which not just allowed you to take multiple exposures, but also long exposures (you hold down the shutter for as long as you want, allowing you to paint with light and blur). it has a mirror on the front of the camera so you can take trippy multiple selfies, a close up mode, and of course, it's instant, meaning you get that gratification from seeing your photos develop in real time over the course of a minute or two. i found this camera for cheap on ebay, and could not stop playing with it. 

more double exposures i took are on the link in the previous paragraph, so here are some other photos i took with this beast of a camera.

(all of the above photos were taken on the Lomo'Instant, with the only editing being the removal of the typical white border)

d) Lomography

buying the Lomo'Instant reminded me just how much i loved lomography - that whole ethos: abandon perfection, embrace silliness, shoot from the hip. you can make such glorious images when you're not thinking too much about what makes a perfect photo. don't get me wrong, i do that too - film is expensive, i don't want to waste my money on a bunch of old shit. but taking a more liberating "hey, you can make great art if you want to, what matters is that you take photos, not overthinking them" viewpoint is freeing! they say that perfect is the enemy of good, and i took that to heart. i wanted to make art, not just think about making art. 

i remembered how i got into lomography in the first place: a exhibition at the urbis gallery in manchester (RIP: you're now the national football museum). i bought my first lomography branded camera that day - the Lomography Colorsplash.

 i'll go into each of my cameras on another day, but for now let me just say i had a BLAST with this camera. it's lomography to a tee - cheap, cheerful, and ripe for experimentation. that cylinder on the side with the blue flash? you rotate that and change the colour of the flash, so as to bathe your subjects in a blue, green, yellow, pink light. it also has bulb mode. and that's it basically, wrapped up in a cheap plastic lens. it's just fun to play with.

i lost my own, bought on that fateful day 22 years ago, in a house move, but ebay exists and voila, there's a slightly yellowed version of my first lomography camera on sale. i couldn't not. that photo at the beginning of this post? taken by my trusty colorsplash. as were these:

i took this camera to manchester with me when i went to visit my sister for what i didn't realise was the last time in november 2024. walking around my old home town with my old camera felt extremely nostalgic; that photo of the guitars is a remake of a photo i'd taken over a decade prior. and now: i'd been bitten by the bug.

i think that's enough for one post, right? for a start, this is all backstory. 2025 hasn't really begun yet. let's get into that! you can read the second part of this retrospective here!

if you're buying film in the uk, i can't recommend Analogue Wonderland enough. they sell all sorts of weird and wonderful film, and if you follow that link you'll get a coupon for a FREE roll of Kentmere Pan 400, a decent quality black and white film. oh, and when you've finished your roll, send it off to Gulabi - they're cheap, provide high quality scans, and they're super fast too.