Travel Series

Winter-Spring 2004

Love, Holga

In January of 2004, I flew to Paris, France to begin a French study abroad. The months that followed became an anchor for my artistic voice and self-expression. After the semester ended, one of my brothers met me in England and we backpacked through England, Italy, and France together.

As a poor college student traveling through Europe, I didn’t have much, but I did have my cameras. I carried two cameras with me: my 35mm Nikon and my medium format toy Holga, a plastic-lens film camera known for its soft focus, light leaks, and beautifully unpredictable images. By the end of my six months abroad, I returned home with an unexpected archive of images.

The Love Holga series grew out of those travels. Photographing with film asks for a different kind of presence, a presence that meets me in the deepest of ways. When I capture with these tools, I'm forced to be entirely in the moment, fully attentive to what I see and feel, and then release attachment to the image I have made. Often, as was the case with this series, I do not see the photographs until long after the moment has passed. When I finally do sit with images, each one brings me back to the exact moment I took it. I remember the sensation of the moment as poetry within me.

And so, each image in this series feels like a small love letter returned to me by my camera, from Holga, a fragment of time, a memory rediscovered later, filled with the feeling of the moment in which it was made.