Medium is the Message

Exploring what happens when the medium of a piece is also the core its content

This is a photography project from a few years ago. Despite not being ceramic, it’s rooted in the same love for analog and physical processes. A friend and I 3D-printed adapters that allowed us to load 35mm film into a couple old Yashica medium-format film cameras from the ‘50s. This let us take the guard rails off of the process of capturing images on film, and incorporate bits of the process into the images themselves. The pictures bleed over metadata usually invisible to people seeing the final pictures, and the grommets used to advance the film through camera are prominently visible. Images also often overlap as accidental double exposures, as we had to guess how far to advance the film between shots, with the distance changing as the spooled film rolled around itself. Lastly, the cameras, like most analog medium format cameras, had a window that’s usually used to view the exposure number printed on paper-backed medium format film. Normally a harmless way of observing metadata about the process, the windows soon became a frequent part of the compositions themselves, becoming a rectangular ovoid burned into the center of the frame whenever the sensitive window was opened, accidentally or otherwise.