In December 2014 I decided to apply for 52rolls. As all of us here, I would commit myself to shooting (at least) 52 film rolls in 2015, develop them or have them developed, scan them, edit them, and put them up on the blog with little essays I would write for each. To my own surprise…
I began this journey the simple way. The way that all journeys should start, with one foot put in front of the other, with small wheels turning, with the expectation of adventure and experience. I packed a small camera, one without many settings and options, and I used a trusted, simple, honest film. I took…
Looking back over the past fifty (by gad, fifty!) rolls, it’s kind of amazing how many turned out ok. How few issues I had. Sure, there was a film or two that had suffered from being frozen and thawed and refrozen when I moved from one apartment to another, but mostly that could be fixed…
Months ago I posted a roll shot on a trip to Bonn. I had posted it late, much later than usual, and thus called the little essay I wrote for it “Out of Season.” Since life got in the way of me scanning and posting many of my rolls since last September, I guess all…
The Deutsches Museum in Munich is a wondrous place. I remember walking its halls as a child, marveling at all the huge machinery that somehow had been brought into the building. Planes, ships, cars, trains, steam machines, waterwheels, huge capacitors and giant early computers. When I moved to Munich, I pictured myself spending a lot…
Once again, I found myself in Bonn. Cologne itself offers up many entertainment options, including theater, cinemas, museums, stores, stadiums and parks. But somehow we keep going back to Bonn and its orderly streets and few but impressive museums, its former governmental architecture and its small-town antics. I took some images from this roll still…
When the trip to Sweden had ended, the vacation hadn’t yet. Still, it had been a thing to look forward to, to plan and think about. And when it was over, it was over. It was, much like a Sunday afternoon, a reminder that normalcy would intrude into our lives again before long. We made…
Having returned from Sweden, it was onwards to visit relatives at their own summer retreat. Atypically for a summer house in the land of a thousand lakes, it is located by a river, or maybe better a brook. Clear, cool, flowing water that snakes by woods and fields. They have turned their riverside property into a…
Finland is not the most urbanized of countries, as you might well suspect. Where it is urban, however, it is very much so, and often in a brutalist fashion. Especially the centers of small and medium sized towns all over Finland often appear as if forcefully pulled into the 20th century at some point during…
Umeå is small, bustling, and charming. Or, well, the town center is. When you arrive by ship, you’re not actually in Umeå. You’re in a port area, industrial looking and grim, but bordering lush forests as well. A gaggle of buses waits for the ship to take tourists into town. It takes about half an hour…
Thomas Mann’s sad but evocative early novella, “Death in Venice” contains these haunting words: He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: because of the hard-working artist’s yearning for repose, his desire to take shelter in the bosom of undifferentiated immensity from the demanding complexity of the world’s phenomena; because of his own proclivity – forbidden, directly…
At the end of our trip through the fields of Finland was Vaasa – or Wasa, as many Finns in this part of the country speak Swedish as their mother tongue, a reminder of the two countries’ entwined history, for much of which Finland was effectively part of Sweden – a town named for King…
52 rolls 