Years Not Lost

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Aaron Canipe

It sat in my top drawer in my bedroom for a few years. A roll of 800 ISO Fuji Superia 24-exposure 35mm film. It sat in a box with a few coins in it, it sat in a box to through half of high school and all of college and sat in a moving box and later a drawer in a closet used for storage. And there it sat. Searching for some 35mm negative sleeves, I found this roll of film with the leader sticking out, thinking it unused. So I shot it. I took my film to a locally-owned film processors’/dry cleaners’ in town and when I got the film back, “Double Exposed” was written on the outside sleeve, containing the 4″ x 6″ glossy prints.

And double exposed it was. Every 24 frames were exposed nearly directly on top of each other. The two pictures in one frame are separated by six years. I took these pictures back in 2006, I believe. Or maybe 2005. I don’t recall what’s happening in them, why I was taking them and the fact that pictures I took a week ago sit on top of them, make the reasons harder to uncover. I was astounded for a number of reasons. Not just in how some of the pictures directly correlate like the two cameras or the ever-present self portrait in a reflected object, but in the separation of themselves by time. Time is of course a major factor in photography, but, more importantly (especially in film photography) there’s luck. It’s true I wanted some of the recent pictures on this roll to turn out, but the gift I was given in forgetting outweighed the expected; the luck of happenstance made me appreciate the act of photographing even more. It got me to notice how my vision was and still is evolving, yet my mind’s eye hasn’t changed much in six or seven years and may not ever. That, I think, is innate.

I don’t know how I got away with it. Carrying that little Canon AE-1 camera around during high school — which I got at the flea market. Much like today when I go photographing, I think most of my peers and teachers wrote it off as just me doing my thing and let me about my way. There’s some pictures I could see me taking now, beneath the expected and posed ones. There’s some pictures where I don’t know what is happening, or who I was photographing at the time, where I’m at, or what season it is. I’m even fuzzy on the exact year. Why was I photographing at the time? Why was I doing it last week? Because we have to.

This unexpected lesson in the traits of photography as a medium, what it represents, got me thinking about its importance in regards to memory. Since some aspects of photography are memories, what happens when we don’t remember them? I’m slightly nostalgic, but it’s in a dense fog of layers, transposed with current images, their reasons, and reasons I took pictures six or seven years ago. I like to remember, but I can’t with these. What does this nostalgia mean? This grey area is very enticing.

What I Mean When I Talk About the South

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Aaron Canipe

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” — William Faulkner, “Light in August”

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my pictures regarding my senior thesis. So here’s an update. Since my crusade of shooting 100 sheets of 4×5 film during the summer, I’ve dabbled here and there in Northern Virginia, much closer to DC than North Carolina, shooting only a little bit. Thanksgiving break saw a 90-sheet increase in my shooting and later at Christmas, 140 sheets down. I took my first picture within the bounds of thesis during the first week of July 2011. It’s a portrait of my father on the beach. The last image I took for this project (for now) was of a red out building out in the community of Vale, North Carolina. The sun had just set and the landscape had sort of a blue sameness to it, except for this pale red barn out near my great aunt’s house. I’m not one to take pictures of barns, but with one last sheet left, I couldn’t resist the visual symmetry on this clear, winter’s evening. Sometimes you have to take those kind of pictures to get to the next ones. Both of these images I described were taken in extreme circumstances, 100+ degree temperatures on a windy beach, the other, nearly below freezing temperatures out in the foothills. As of now, neither one of these pictures made it into the final edit.

A lot of things have come up when talking and photographing this project regarding growing up in the South, that is say, Southern memory, personal and historic. I’m not so sure “what’s Southern” can even be described in words without mentioning some of the stereotypes of the culture. The South I grew up is nothing like the South Bill Christenberry or Bill Eggelston photographed. It remains a part of American mythology. To me, what’s Southern is something much more simple than old storefronts, sweet tea, or NASCAR, although I have photographed those things to get to the next things. Coming closer, but never quite being able to define Southern heritage. It’s almost like living in a photographic paradox, separating what’s Southern from what’s actually American, or more importantly, what’s personal from what’s global. Of course I think it begins with the Civil War, but, writer Walker Percy puts it more eloquently. It’s a statement of his I still stand by.

“There is a Southern heritage, and it has nothing to do with the colonel in the whiskey ad. It has to do with the conservative tradition of a predominately agrarian society, a tradition which at its best enshrined the humane aspects of living for rich and poor, black and white. It gave first place to a stable family life, sensitivity and good manners between men, chivalry toward women, an honor code, and individual integrity. If one wishes to sneer at such values, let him; but I can’t help wondering if the sneer does not conceal a contempt for all traditions.”

I think that’s what my thesis is all about. Here are some new images from that body of work.