After exposing a roll of film on the beach, I removed it from my camera and built a device that kept the film submersed in ocean water, secured against the ebb and flow of the tide. After three days, I fetched and developed the film, which was already covered in small barnacles.
Whereas most film has only a graced relationship with place, seeing through a complex system of glass and being touched only by refractions of light, I allowed this roll of film to physically interact with the environment it was endeavoring to represent.
The film base became a substrate marked not only by ethereal impressions of light but also by the physical properties of the environment—which together form imagery more descriptive than otherwise possible. The serendipitous interplay of film and sand and salt almost becomes a manifestation of the ocean experience—the marks becoming, at least in my mind, bubbles, sand dollars and barnacles.
Whereas most film has only a graced relationship with place, seeing through a complex system of glass and being touched only by refractions of light, I allowed this roll of film to physically interact with the environment it was endeavoring to represent.
The film base became a substrate marked not only by ethereal impressions of light but also by the physical properties of the environment—which together form imagery more descriptive than otherwise possible. The serendipitous interplay of film and sand and salt almost becomes a manifestation of the ocean experience—the marks becoming, at least in my mind, bubbles, sand dollars and barnacles.
