life on film by Rona Keller

life on film

We are the generation of digital media. We grew up with the last daily used film cameras, and into a world of taking thousands of photos, seeing them right away and not paying much attention to the value of a single photograph anymore. is meant for giving those a space for their work who still find comfort in the shutter of a film camera, the grain in a photo and even the waiting until a film is developed. Even more so, it focuses on those young ones who rediscovered a love for something they couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;t fully experience at a time it was being used by the whole world. Whether it be home, nostalgia for something or another human being, we all have something we would like to hold onto. Along with some words on related subjects, the following pages not only show the analogue work of six individual photographers, but also outline what can be found behind it. Thoughts and stories, feelings and experiences, and most of all a lot of memories.

life on film

So long,

Rona

Photographer Harder Photographer- -Cassoday Cassoday Harder

Photographer - Cassoday Harder

reflections

I will always marvel at the beauty my eyes have been allowed to see, my ears to hear, the beautiful people I’ve met, the things I’ve felt and continue to feel. things like open roads and late afternoons and warm and bitter cold, late night conversations, intimacy, changing seasons, hand holding, and all that. and I want my photos to be a compilation of everything. I think it’s a constant work in progress. if someone can look at a photo I took and peg something about the feeling of that moment, maybe even feel it themselves, even just for a brief moment; I think that’s it. I’ve done it. my purpose is to expose my fragility, my madness, my happiness and sadness, and my attempted vulnerability through my photographs. I think that being able to do that shows great strength in a person.

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Photographer - Cassoday Harder

Photographer - Rachel Dowda

Mount Shasta lavender fields, California West Palm Beach, Florida

West Palm Beach, Florida

Photographer - Rachel Dowda

Eutaw, Alabama

I biked everyday and started to collect lost feathers, tightly gripping them in my sweaty hands until I got home. At night I would steal my neighbor’s flowers and lay them gently between pages of heavy books, excited for the next time I’d see them - flat and stiff. I photographed them all the time, my bedroom and my collections were my treasures. The next year I signed up to work at a camp in northern California. I remember crying in my bedroom, so upset to leave home and the memories I collected there. I left with too much luggage and a small box filled with a map of the southeast, my feathers, and flowers to hang up in my new house. The house I was convinced would never feel like home. The night I arrived I climbed up to the top bunk in a room with seven girls. The bed creaked as I carefully hung up all my treasures from home. My roommates gasped and squealed with jealousy. “I like to nest” was my only comment. Over the summer my little space began to feel more and more like home. I enjoyed sharing a kitchen, talking all night, and hearing the breathing of others as I fell asleep. My beloved room back in Florida wasn‘t missed as I fell in love with the mountains, sneaking out at night to photograph the stars, and napping next to streams in hammocks. With every new adventure and moment of inspiration, I picked a flower and pressed it between the pages of my journal. By the end of the summer I had a box of new treasures and twenty rolls of film to bring home with me.

My room felt violently quiet and empty upon returning to my house. The city lights shut out the stars. I would go to my sister’s room at night, but she wanted space and all I wanted was seven roommates again. I felt like I had been uprooted like all my beloved flowers. “California is my home. Not Florida,” I would say to myself. My mom told me that all the flowers hanging from my ceiling made my room feel like a funeral parlor. I agreed with her, but left them there. A few months later I moved to live in a barn in Eutaw, Alabama. Once again, I lived in a bedroom with seven other girls. This time the bed didn‘t creak as I carefully hung up all my treasures from home and California. The girls also had things to hang up by their beds.....we all nested. Here I fell in love with the crowded bathrooms and the sound the rain made on the tin roof. I would read and paint upstairs and swing on the front porch. We had bonfires that were probably illegal they were so big. We became twenty brothers and sisters, and we would sing as we pruned the vineyards and ate off each other’s plates. In the spring I collected branches from the vineyard and wildflowers from beneath my window. The other girls started collecting things too. I left with more things than I came with and over ten rolls of film to prove how wonderful my home was. That summer I went to California again and felt the same things, but I started to understand them this time. I was made to live in community. I was made to spin under constellations. I can feel just as at home sleeping under the stars as I can in a little house in the mountains or in a barn in the south. Home isn‘t having your own room and your own bathroom and plenty of space to hoard your stuff, but feeling safe and being able to sing and brush your teeth with other people. Home is looking through your camera lens and feeling the same things no matter where you are.

from being home to feeling home

I fell in love with the concept of home the same year I fell in love with shooting film. It was the year after my room had no windows; I kept my head down, slumped in my chair and bit my nails until they bled. Eventually I moved into a room with windows big enough to cause me to never turn on the lights. At night my sister would knock on the wall we shared and I would come over to her room, lay in her bed, and we would whisper and laugh until my mom told me to leave her alone. I fell in love with my house and town through the lens of my camera. We started to explore the hidden places and ran around like wild youth, high off of the idea of a new roll to shoot.

When I came home I didn‘t unpack my feathers or flowers. I figured it would be easier to move again the next time if I left them in their box. After all, home can be anywhere, and life is lovelier that way.

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Photographer - Rachel Dowda

journals written in all places

36 things I've collected over the past year and a half

a feather collected from each place

Photographer - Rachel Dowda

Etna, California

Mount Shasta lavender fields, California

Photographer - Rachel Dowda

Eutaw, Alabama

Photographer - Rachel Dowda

Eutaw, Alabama

West Palm Beach, Florida

Photographer - Rachel Dowda

Words on Home

Home Is Not A P lace — Ruth Tram

To anyone who’s had to leave a city they love, to anyone who’s had to stomach an unwelcome goodbye, to anyone whose dissatisfaction with the present has nothing to do with selfishness but everything to do with longing, and to anyone who’s unfortunate and lucky enough to know the truth behind these clichés: I know. I know what it’s like to leave, come back, and have your body betray your loathing of the present. When presented with a map, your eyes dart to where you’d rather be. Your feet point in the direction you’d rather be walking. Your mouth emits sentences tinged with nostalgia. I haven’t known many homes, but I’ve lived in enough places to know it always sucks to leave — to build a life in a city only to leave it behind knowing if you ever go back it will never be the same. And I haven’t known many loves, but I’ve gotten close to enough people to know it still always sucks to leave — to care until you don’t, care until you can’t, or care so much that you just have to stop altogether. I know because although globalization says the world is small, I want it to remain big. The chasm of distance between me and the place I left shouldn’t be remedied by a single plane ride or a simple phone call. It shouldn’t be that easy. For the pain that expanse has caused me, that trip should take a lifetime. Because making a home out of all the places I’ve lived has been simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Some days I delight in the fact that my soul is deposited in several pockets of the world. Other days it makes me feel empty. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to retrieve those parts of myself, or if they were meant to stay there, unbeknownst to all those who come after me.

In the end, I left to go home. Because that’s what people do during the holidays. We retrace our paths by following the string of yarn we have tethered to our backs. We trail the mess we’ve woven to find the knot that keeps us anchored. When I returned, the house I grew up in no longer felt like my home. I had pulled too hard. I hadn’t noticed, but my cord had broken off and when I finally cared to look, I was left tangled in yarn with places to turn to but no discernable dwelling. I realized that home is not a place. It cannot possibly be a place because if I really had one refuge I could name by a set of coordinates or a three-line address, you can bet I’d be there. I’d be there to kiss you when you wake, push your hair back after you shower, and slice the bananas for our breakfast. I’d be there to argue when you come home, swear when the moment calls for it, and give in when it strikes my fancy. All those things and more if I only knew where to go. Instead I’m left with one long list of destinations and two empty hands. Because my life is in flux and home cannot possibly be a place. But home might be an amalgamation of people I have grown to trust, despite my best efforts to keep a distance. Home might be the moment my raveled yarn got intertwined with yours and I couldn’t look back without seeing all our entanglements. In the past year, the idea of one residence for my soul has become more and more impractical. But if home has to be a physical space, its area isn’t something I could map out if I tried. Any sense of belonging I have oscillates between being too big and too small to comprehend. For though my home spans oceans, it is no smaller than the gap between our bodies at night and no wider than the periphery of your embrace.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/rthtam/2012/03/home-is-not-a-place/

Photographers - Danka & Peter

Krvavica, Croatia Omiš, Croatia

DevĂn, Slovakia

Photographers - Danka & Peter

Peak Slavkovsky, Slovakia

Peak Ä&#x17D;umbier, Slovakia

Photographers - Danka & Peter

in the train towards home

Photographers - Danka & Peter

Bratislava, Slovakia

Malรก Fatra, Slovakia

Bratislava, Slovakia

Who you are now is influenced by every moment that you have experienced, every human being who you met. Every detail and situation affects who you are right now. It’s a process which lasts a lifetime, but in some periods, like the period of adolescence, it‘s much more intense. We fell in love when we were very young. We were eighteen and not mature at all. We still aren’t. It’s not easy maturing with someone. It’s a very intimate and deep process inside when a person is looking for themselves. And at the same time you form a relationship with a person, who is since the beginning unaccountably important for you. On the other hand, it can be beautiful. In addition to your own maturation you can create a common path with the person you love.

And photography is our common vision and a form of expressing fragments of our life. We love capturing moments and mostly nature, which is very close to our spirit. We feel like in rainbows when we are there. And then in the evening, when we are lying in bed and looking at those pictures, we refresh our memory. Everyone in the world sees love and relationships differently. Everyone needs something different inside, but all people agree that love is beautiful and an irreplaceable part of our lives. In each form.

the story of our stories

What is important in our together life, is that we don’t love just each other. We deeply love our travelling together, taking pictures, long walks in the forest, hiking, being in nature, lying in bed, climbing, talking.... We are here for each other as trusted friends.

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PodolĂnec, Slovakia

Photographers - Danka & Peter

Austria

Omiš, Croatia

Why You Should Travel Young — Jeff Goins

As I write this, I’m flying. It’s an incredible concept: to be suspended in the air, moving at two hundred miles an hour — while I read a magazine. Amazing, isn’t it? I woke up at three a.m. this morning. Long before the sun rose, thirty people loaded up three conversion vans and drove two hours to the San Juan airport. Our trip was finished. It was time to go home. But we were changed. As I sit, waiting for the flight attendant to bring my ginger ale, I’m left wondering why I travel at all. The other night, I was reminded why I do it — why I believe this discipline of travel is worth all the hassle. I was leading a missions trip in Puerto Rico. After a day of work, as we were driving back to the church where we were staying, one of the young women brought up a question. “Do you think I should go to graduate school or move to Africa?” I don’t think she was talking to me. In fact, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t. But that didn’t stop me from offering my opinion. I told her to travel. Hands down. No excuses. Just go. She sighed, nodding. “Yeah, but…” I had heard this excuse before, and I didn’t buy it. I knew the “yeah-but” intimately. I had uttered it many times before. The words seem innocuous enough, but are actually quite fatal.

Wordson Travelling

“You come here often?” he asked. I could have laughed. “Um, yeah, I guess,” I said, still wiping the crusted pieces of whatever out of my eyes. “That’s great,” he said. “Just great.” I nodded, not really paying attention. He had already had his adrenaline shot; I was still waiting for mine. I somehow uttered that a friend and I had been coming to the gym for a few weeks now, about three times a week. “Great,” Dr. Eisenhautz repeated. He paused as if to reflect on what he would say next. Then, he just blurted it out. The most profound thing I had heard in my life. “The habits you form here will be with you for the rest of your life.” My head jerked up, my eyes got big, and I stared at him, letting the words soak into my half-conscious mind. He nodded, said a gruff goodbye, and left. I was dumbfounded. The words reverberated in my mind for the rest of the day. Years later, they still haunt me. It’s true — the habits you form early in life will, most likely, be with you for the rest of your existence.

This phrase is lethal. It makes it sound like we have the best of intentions, when really we are just too scared to do what we should. It allows us to be cowards while sounding noble. Most people I know who waited to travel the world never did it. Conversely, plenty of people who waited for grad school or a steady job still did those things after they traveled.

I have seen this fact proven repeatedly. My friends who drank a lot in college drink in larger quantities today. Back then, we called it “partying.” Now, it has a less glamorous name: alcoholism. There are other examples. The guys and girls who slept around back then now have babies and unfaithful marriages. Those with no ambition then are still working the same dead end jobs. “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle once said. While I don’t want to sound all gloom-and-doom, and I believe your life can turn around at any moment, there is an important lesson here: life is a result of intentional habits. So I decided to do the things that were most important to me first, not last.

It reminded me of Dr. Eisenhautz and the men’s locker room. Dr. Eisenhautz was a German professor at my college. I didn’t study German, but I was a foreign language student so we knew each other. This explains why he felt the need to strike up a conversation with me at six o’clock one morning. I was about to start working out, and he had just finished. We were both getting dressed in the locker room.

After graduating college, I joined a band and traveled across North America for nine months. With six of my peers, I performed at schools, churches, and prisons. We even spent a month in Taiwan on our overseas tour. (We were huge in Taiwan.) As part of our low-cost travel budget, we usually stayed in people’s homes. Over dinner or in conversation later in the evening, it would almost always come up — the statement I dreaded. As we were

Yeah, but … … what about debt? … what about my job? … what about my boyfriend?

It was, to say the least, a little awkward — two grown men shooting the breeze while taking off their clothes.

conversing about life on the road — the challenges of long days, being cooped up in a van, and always being on the move — some well-intentioned adult would say, “It’s great that you’re doing this … while you’re still young.” Ouch. Those last words — while you’re still young — stung like a squirt of lemon juice in the eye (a sensation with which I am well acquainted). They reeked of vicarious longing and mid-life regret. I hated hearing that phrase. I wanted to shout back, “No, this is NOT great while I’m still young! It’s great for the rest of my life! You don’t understand. This is not just a thing I’m doing to kill time. This is my calling! My life! I don’t want what you have. I will always be an adventurer.” In a year, I will turn thirty. Now I realize how wrong I was. Regardless of the intent of those words, there was wisdom in them. As we get older, life can just sort of happen to us. Whatever we end up doing, we often end up with more responsibilities, more burdens, more obligations. This is not always bad. In fact, in many cases it is really good. It means you’re influencing people, leaving a legacy. Youth is a time of total empowerment. You get to do what you want. As you mature and gain new responsibilities, you have to be very intentional about making sure you don’t lose sight of what’s important. The best way to do that is to make investments in your life so that you can have an effect on who you are in your later years. I did this by traveling. Not for the sake of being a tourist, but to discover the beauty of life — to remember that I am not complete. There is nothing like riding a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge or seeing the Coliseum at sunset. I wish I could paint a picture for you of how incredible the Guatemalan mountains are or what a rush it is to appear on Italian TV. Even the amazing photographs I have of Niagara Falls and the American Midwest countryside do not do these experiences justice. I can’t tell you how beautiful southern Spain is from the vantage point of a train; you have to experience it yourself. The only way you can relate is by seeing them. While you’re young, you should travel. You should take the time to see the world and taste the fullness of life. Spend an afternoon sitting in front of the Michelangelo. Walk the streets of Paris. Climb Kilimanjaro. Hike the Appalachian trail. See the Great Wall of China. Get your heart broken by the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Swim through the Great Barrier Reef. These are the moments that define the rest of your life; they’re the experiences that stick with you forever.

Traveling will change you like little else can. It will put you in places that will force you to care for issues that are bigger than you. You will begin to understand that the world is both very large and very small. You will have a newfound respect for pain and suffering, having seen that two-thirds of humanity struggle to simply get a meal each day. While you’re still young, get cultured. Get to know the world and the magnificent people that fill it. The world is a stunning place, full of outstanding works of art. See it. You won’t always be young. And life won’t always be just about you. So travel, young person. Experience the world for all it’s worth. Become a person of culture, adventure, and compassion. While you still can. Do not squander this time. You will never have it again. You have a crucial opportunity to invest in the next season of your life now. Whatever you sow, you will eventually reap. The habits you form in this season will stick with you for the rest of your life. So choose those habits wisely. And if you’re not as young as you’d like (few of us are), travel anyway. It may not be easy or practical, but it’s worth it. Traveling allows you to feel more connected to your fellow human beings in a deep and lasting way, like little else can. In other words, it makes you more human. That’s what it did for me, anyway.

http://convergemagazine.com/travel-young-5278/

Photographer - Jessie Roth

nostalgia

these pictures and texts recount a really particular time in my life that can't really be characterized by anything other than my camera. I think about it and I don't know my exact age bracket anymore, but I know the mood and the feeling and the emotion. this is when I started to take pictures, this is when I started writing about my experiences. mostly this is when I learned my life was interesting enough to share and realized there were people interested enough to see things the way I saw them. I brought my camera everywhere and thought it a strange, exciting kind of magic to keep my life documented in this new way. I have a bad memory and pictures and words were poised to help me remember. I look back at them with years in between versions of myself and I remember and I'm glad I have them. it hurts to think about how much changed and how complexity reigns over simplicity now, but that time was important. my camera watched me come into my own and I'm grateful I have proof.

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Feel e W Way e h t e g n a h a C i g st? l a a P t e s th No t s u e o o D Ab

It happens to all of us. You are going about your ordinary day when you walk by a man wearing Curve cologne, and you are instantly reminded of your first boyfriend. The feeling is so powerful that there you are again with him, sitting on that porch from a decade ago, eating Popsicles in June. OK, maybe your first boyfriend didn’t wear Curve (I guess you weren’t dating a guido), but we can all relate to the nostalgic feeling a smell, sound, old picture, or season can stir within.

Words on Nostalgia

John Tierny recently wrote an article for the New York Times titled, „What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows.“ In it, he discusses the findings of Constantine Sedikides, a psychology professor at the University of Southampton who has conducted pioneering research into nostalgia, and believes that the sensation may be a biological tool that allows humans to remember their past fondly so that they may be optimistic toward, and inspired by, the future.

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Nostalgia has been around for as long as there has been memory, but it used to be seen as a psychiatric disorder, something to be cured. Later, it became synonymous with depression and homesickness, even though nostalgia afflicts everyone, regardless of their mood or how far they are from home. This is why in the throes of summer, my favorite season, I become nostalgic for winters past — for layered sweaters, and flannel, and hot coffee, and glittery lights. I think winter blows, so how can I be nostalgic for it? And how can the smell of a stranger’s wet hair on the subway instantly transport me back to my first summer of sleepaway camp? Of the 15 days I was at that camp, it

gher

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Galla Grace

rained for nine, and I cried for seven, but the smell of that hair and the feelings it brought made me so, so happy for a fleeting second. I thought maybe I was just a freak, but one Sunday evening, as I was reading PostSecret, a blog where people anonymously submit postcards that reveal a secret they are harboring, I came across a “secret” that read, “I am nostalgic for a time in my life I wasn’t happy during.” This phenomenon, where we somehow miss things we didn’t even enjoy the first time, stuck with me, so I did some more research, and it turns out we all feel nostalgia for times in our lives that are less than blissful. We do this as a subconscious way of making our pasts more bearable, more joyful. When a certain chapter in our lives has closed for good, it is much easier to feel cheery about it, to glean the goodness of it while fully knowing we will never return to that part of our life. Nostalgia makes us more optimistic and positive about our futures. A BBC webpage explains that, “details evoked by nostalgic smells are not as important as the emotions they recall. But our minds reshape these memories, sending them through a rose-tinted filter that redefines them as ‚good times‘“ What strange creatures we must be to live through something, only to remember not the details of what happened — not the plot of our lives — but how we felt about it. We believe the revised version of the story, and that is enough to keeps us optimistic, to keep us moving forward. I don’t know if I should find comfort in the thought, “Well, this sucks, but when I remember it later it won’t

suck as bad,” but weirdly enough, I do. We are told time and time again by our yoga teachers, our moms, or our tea-bag fortunes to, “be present,” and “live in the moment,” when, in fact, the act of being nostalgic can make us feel better about our present. In his article, Tierny writes, “researchers at Southampton induced negative moods by having people read about a deadly disaster and take a personality test that supposedly revealed them to be exceptionally lonely. Sure enough, the people depressed about the disaster victims or worried about being lonely became more likely to wax nostalgic. And the strategy worked: They subsequently felt less depressed and less lonely.” This isn’t to say that nostalgia only functions as a way to remember things as better than they actually were. I am nostalgic about plenty of things that were truly good to begin with (unless I’m just remembering them that way now). I am nostalgic for vacations, wine on the beach, fireflies, the smell of birthday candles that were just blown out. I think what it comes down to is that, as nostalgic as I get, there isn’t a time in my life that I long to return to. I’m glad to have had those times, and I’m glad to have left them behind. Did I enjoy eating cherry Popsicles on my porch with the boyfriend who reeked of Curve? Absolutely. Do I want to be doing that now? No, that would be weird.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/57943/does-nostalgia-change-the-way-we-feel-about-the-past

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Photographer - Joe Curtin

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Photographer - Joe Curtin

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Photographer - Joe Curtin

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Growing up in Los Angeles was one of the best opportunities I could have ever been given, but it wasn’t something I realized until I moved my entire life to a different coast to attend college in Boston. During my time in high school, I constantly complained that I was “uninspired” or “stuck in a rut” with my photography. I couldn’t wait to get out of Los Angeles, the traffic-filled, star-studded smog capital of America. I wasn’t sure exactly where I wanted to be – all I know is I wanted out. Well, now I am out, and all I can say is I appreciate Los Angeles more than ever. Moving to Boston not only allowed me the opportunity to experience a different pace of life, but also forced me to reflect on just how lucky I am to have experienced the adolescence that I did. Change puts things into perspective. I didn’t realize until I moved that everything I “hated” or was “tired of ” was in fact what I would miss the most. I would miss driving down Pacific Coast Highway at sunset with the windows down, blasting Fleetwood Mac. I would miss riding my bike along the beach on a sunny December afternoon with my best friend Cleo. I would miss going to the Fairfax Flea Market every Sunday and bargaining with the sellers for a cheaper price. I would miss skinny-dipping in my friend Hannah’s pool at 2am and then bouncing on the trampoline under the light of the moon. I would miss Friday nights at The Smell in downtown, Saturday beach days at Ocean Park Lifeguard Tower 26, Saturday evenings on Morgan’s back patio sipping on wine and eating delicious meals, and Sunday morning brunch on Melrose. I would miss the beach, the city, the hikes, driving, my friends, my family. I would miss everything. And the worst part of it all? I took it all for granted when I was there, and I didn’t realize how much growing up in such a dynamic, versatile, and lively city would have an impact on me as a person, as well as on my photography. Now, it’s probably worth clarifying that I love Boston. I’m so glad I decided to come here for college, and in the past few months I have learned a lot about myself. I’ve grown to be more independent, I’ve met amazing people, I am dating my first ever boyfriend (the same boy from the journal entries!), and much, much more. In fact, I feel incredibly inspired in this city, and I love the direction my photography has taken since I’ve arrived here. I love capturing memories, and there are many, many, many memories to be had in college. It’s interesting to be able to take pictures in the snow instead of the sun, at the river instead of the beach, against colonial buildings instead of beach bungalows. I always have a camera by my side, ready to capture anything that comes my way. What I have learned most about myself as a photographer is that change is necessary in order to maintain inspiration. I believe a whole new side of me has emerged since I began college, and that new side has affected my photography greatly. The best part about all of it, however, is not the new photos I’m able to create, but how much I have grown to love my photos from my time in Los Angeles. I flip back through photographs from the past few years, and I see them in a way I never did before. I love them – they perfectly encapsulate the life I lived for all of those years. The beach, the sun, the amazing friends… It’s all there. These photos hold memories that are unbelievably important to me, and knowing that those memories will live on forever is one of the best feelings in the world. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we should embrace change wholeheartedly, for it can provide us with new experiences and a completely different outlook on life. At the same time, however, we can’t take where we come from for granted, because we really don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. Thankfully for me, Los Angeles will always be there, basking underneath the scorching sun, happily awaiting my return.

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Photographer - Joe Curtin

on change

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Photographer - Joe Curtin

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Photographer - Joe Curtin

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