Last of the Steam-Powered Trains

I've threatened to start this blog for a while.

I just finished graduate school, and I find myself with a great deal of spare time that had been taken up with reading about rhetorical theory. I knew that I should devote this newly-freed-up time to something I've been woefully bad at the last several years: focusing on photography.

I really enjoy photography. Specifically traditional black and white film photography. Oh, I'm not a professional, let me point that out right now. Sometimes I get lucky, I've taken some decent shots, but a quick Google Image search will show you that I'm not any sort of authority. All the same, I'm in love with the process. I develop my film at home in my sink. I rent darkroom space from a lab in town and print when I can. I find the experience to be meditative and deeply satisfying, even if I rarely find the prints to be so satisfying.

I decided months ago that I would spend a year focusing on photography, shooting every week, and posting the results on a blog to hold myself accountable. If I can look back on it at the end of a year and see improvement--even small improvement--it will have been worthwhile.

Two factors have finally pushed me to get on the stick: my birthday and a Kinks song.

I turned 31 this weekend. While that was not anywhere near as monumental a landmark as turning 30 (an event marked by a temper tantrum on my part followed by a great deal of gin), it did serve to remind me that procrastination is the enemy. I am not getting younger, and what better time to mark the start of an educational year than my birthday.

But more importantly, today I was listening to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and it put an idea into my head that pushed me to go ahead and do this. For those of you who don't know, that album is essentially Ray Davies' long-form exploration of nostalgia. He sings about the England of his youth besieged by "American tourists;" about his old friends forgetting his name; about the good old days that won't return. But at the same time, what makes the album work is that Davies is obviously aware that it's all a fantasy. Nostalgia is a longing for what you remember, not what was; what you remember was never actually there to begin with. It's just a story you tell yourself.

In particular, I am thinking about the song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains:"

Like the last of the good ol' choo-choo trains,
Huff and puff 'till I blow this world away,
And I'm gonna keep on rollin' till my dying day.
I'm the last of the good old fashioned steam-powered trains.

For me this song captures the inspiring, confrontational, here's-mud-in-your-eye feeling of thinking that you are the last of a dying breed. You're a flag-waver for an older, more pure way of being, and damn the torpedoes, you're going to keep on rollin' till your dying day. You against the world! It's a satisfying fantasy, but it's just a fantasy.

I indulge in this fantasy sometimes.

I'm not against digital cameras at all, but I'm also not interested very much in them. Photography for me is about the experience, and I admit to feeling a certain bit of pride in using 30-, 40-, 50-year old equipment to make an image. Autofocus makes me uncomfortable, I want to set the aperture by clicking the barrel, and I eat film grain for breakfast. I admit that, in my less-than-good moods, I get kind of a chip on my shoulder about it. And then I get to thinking that I'm the last of a dying breed, and that film photography is some sort of grandiose fight-the-power lost cause.

But that's a stupid way to live. Love for the past and respect for a way of working is one thing; making it into an oppositional fantasy is something else entirely. I catch myself thinking along these lines--that by working in an old-fashioned medium, I'm somehow making a statement to the whole modern system--and it's silly. It's like Andy Samberg throwing everything on the ground.

Ansel Adams says that photography is "an inclusive language." There's no shortage of pictures to be taken or ways to take them. I am not the last of the steam-powered trains, and this is not a race. I am just a guy who loves his cameras and wants to do the best he can.

Let's see where the year takes me.