A decade-and-a-half-long film

A roll of film that squatted in the belly of a point-and-shoot camera for a decade, maybe even longer. I never really forgot about it, not completely at least. There were, of course, long periods when I didn’t think about it, but a part of me—a club of irreducible controllers among my neurons—knew, on some level, that the roll still existed. It was a gift I’d given to my future self, like when you leave five euros in your winter coat pocket so you can smile at yourself the following year, when the coat comes in handy again with the first cold.

This is more or less how it went. At some point, my artist and tinkerer friend Jeremy—one of those people who does one thing and thinks up a hundred—started picking up point-and-shoot cameras at Berlin flea markets. He’d buy them for a few euros from house-clearance guys (back then, in the early 2010s, analog photography hadn’t yet experienced the biblical resurrection that would soon come), test them, repair the broken ones, and resell them. He did this for a while, and sometimes I was lucky enough to help him with the repairs.

One time—I’ll always remember it—we were meticulously unscrewing every single tiny screw from the plastic cover of a little Olympus that had seen better days, and, in a fit of frustration (I swear, the screws were endless, tiny, and so hard to unscrew), I snarled the question—more to the cosmos and the saints than to Jeremy: “Why, why do they put in so many screws!??” Serene as ever, Jeremy replied, “To keep people like you and me from doing exactly what we’re doing right now.” As banal as it sounds, that moment remains one of my fondest memories from that period, and even now the conversation holds a hermetic depth in my memory that makes it especially dear. It’s the memory of a family moment.

But let’s get back to the roll. Berlin, early 2010s. An experienced photographer and an apprentice, both tinkerers, decide to open up, test, shoot, and mess around with automatic cameras that, with the arrival of digital, had overnight gone from cutting-edge objects to relics destined for the basement. Back then, Jeremy would develop the films; I didn’t know how yet. Who knows where the others ended up, or what they captured. The point-and-shoot era ended suddenly, maybe to start another project, maybe because it was a particular moment in both our lives.

A little box of point-and-shoot cameras, one of which still loaded, stayed at my place. Some I never tested, many don’t work, and without Jeremy I don’t really trust myself to open them. But I never forgot about them, nor did I ever throw them away or give them away. They stayed there, lovingly packed one by one, well kept; over the years, they became the picturesque totem of a strange time in my life, when for the first time I dared to confess to the world my great love for the art of photography and, at the same time, tried to make peace with myself, with the ghosts I was only just beginning to meet.

Shortly after—that was 2014—I learned how to develop film. I started at the beautiful LichtMal lab in Prenzlauer Berg, then I joined a shared lab on Schönhauser Allee, and finally I built a darkroom in one of the two bathrooms in my apartment, and the rolls of developed film started to multiply. In the bathroom on Kastanienallee, almost all the rolls shot in Marghera came to light, along with several portraits and lots of images. But not that roll. That one stayed in the closet, resting inside the little camera with a vaguely wide-angle lens and an awkward grip.

The years went by. Jeremy left the country, I started traveling around Europe looking for industrial ruins to photograph on film, there was a pandemic, countless friends, relatives, lovers, and storytellers passed through my home. And the little box was always there, a box of latent memories. Then life, in one of its somersaults, led me to move to Italy. With a heavy heart and hair now turning white, I moved what the Italian tax office calls “the center of one’s affections” to the Venice area. It was a tough move, but it revealed the treasure of latent wisdom I’d accumulated over the past twenty years.

To be happy, I need only a few things, but the right ones: a peaceful home environment, a person who makes me happy—check. A dog—check. The darkroom—check. In the basement of my house in Mestre, I built my new lab, infinitely better than the previous one, where I started developing and printing film. On one of my recent trips back to Berlin, I opened the closet, found the loaded camera, shot all remaining frames of the roll, and brought it to Mestre to develop.

It was full of photos of Berlin and Mestre in winter, and two photos from many years ago. One is of me, but it’s terribly overexposed, and one is of Jeremy, taken by me. I almost remember the moment I took it. Even that one has a streak of stray light, which maybe makes it even more interesting—one of those effects born from a mistake, that if you tried to do it on purpose, it wouldn’t turn out as well (“when the photo is cleverer than the photographer,” as Wolfgang from LichtMal would say).

So, all these words to say that I developed a roll of film. But this strip of black-and-white photosensitive material was something more. Here, the evocative power of photography reached, for me, a historic high. Taking photos, telling stories—even of things that seem banal at the time, or so powerful that they’re unforgettable—felt more important than ever. Taking a photo suspends time; it allows a moment to take shape beyond the thoughts we formulate about it. The power of vernacular photography is immense in granting us the grace of memory.

Every photo is, first and foremost, the decision to take it—the what, and above all, the how we frame it. The sacred importance of this gesture is slightly obscured in the age of digital photography, which is virtually free and often bypasses any pre-shot reflection (though not, it should be said, any post-shot depth of thought, for the benefit of the medium’s detractors and hipsters). In vernacular photography, the dimension is personal and intimate, and it probably approaches the archetypal language of the psychoanalytic dream. For me, this roll represented something like that: a collection of fragments from my present and past life converging through a lens, years apart, with myself as the focal point.

Thank you, Jeremy, for introducing me to the darkroom and for being my tinkerer friend. Thanks to everything and everyone who has passed through my life, before and after. On to the next adventure.