“This is why I love shooting film…instead of looking at a picture you shot you can only think about it, until you’ve developed it.”

I’ve been pondering this tweet by Colorado photographer, Laura Cofrin. Though I don’t shoot in film anymore, I was trained in the medium and in darkroom skills, and I grew up waiting for days or even weeks for prints of family vacations to come back from the lab. We were all so excited to see them! My young self found the required patience to be excruciating.

Now my older self is much more patient. After I’ve been out in the land creating installations, I rarely look at the images until a day or two later, sometimes longer. My creativity is drained and I’m physically spent — I have no desire to immediately see what I did. It takes me a while to regain energy. Occasionally when scrolling through my Lightroom catalog, I find a few images months and years later and see them with fresh eyes. (I’ve recently been working with images of installations from a couple of years ago.)

Pondering Laura’s tweet has caused me to consider my delay in relation to my installations. Does thinking about the pictures instead of looking at them right away cause me to really see the installations instead of seeing what I wanted them to be?

Hmmmm.

Photo: Kodak Duaflex IV (circa 1960), my first camera, a hand-me-down from my parents.