Have been experimenting with trying to make more eco photo developers for a good few months and while I have Caffenol down, instant coffees not exactly local or traceable so have been replacing the coffee part of the recipe with locally collected plant and seaweed infusions and jiggling the amounts, temperatures and times, most often it’s commercially speaking a bust and ‘technically’ it’s a mess but I catch images. I actually love the ‘failed’ frames as well as the ones with images (and the failures are important) plus I like that the whole process has changed my notion of a lens based image to something whole lot more abstract and wild and free.
Something wacky happened in the dev idk what, the writing on the sprockets bleached off almost and there’s insane streaks and what not but ah sure look I couldn’t have planned it and I’ll never get another roll to look like that ever again so 💚 alls I do is record the tiny details of each test and keep repeating with something tweaked for better or worse.
Music is my own set against a short loop of 35mm frames developed in an infusion of bracken and gorse in the autumn. Samples are collected (ethically in tiny amounts from abundant areas) from forest land which is undergoing changes in use. Up to now swathes of our forests were used as Sitka Spruce plantation, creating a dense ceiling that smothered all biodiversity and acidified the soils. These plantations were clear felled and left wastelands. I once heard photography described as the capturing of loss and this poetic notion lingers in my brain. Photographs document a moment gone forever. I used bracken and gorse, the native plants of the woodland floor, as my developer for these photos and thought about loss while developing this roll. Loss of habitats, the degradation of the land and environment and loss of connection to the earth echoed through the roll taken on suburban walks and was made physical in scratched, blank and disrupted images haunted by recognisable ghosts.
