When I was younger, a week lasted forever. A month seemed to surpass an eternity. Oh, and you could forget about speaking of time in terms of years; I was an impatient little lady. These days, time vaporizes into thin air. The sun sets long before I’ve had enough time to enjoy the sunrise. Weeks fade into months, and now it’s already mid-October. Make way for MMXII!

I eventually learned patience from a Vivitar V50 35mm SLR camera—the most modest model at the time, in comparison to the Nikon, Pentax, and Minolta mammoths. My dad picked it up for my older sister when she was 16, and she generously passed it along to me when she graduated from high school. My relationship with the manual camera was shaky at first. I had zero interest in the contraption, other than it serving as a paperweight for my chemistry homework. Balancing chemical equations was my specialty, as was lighting a Bunsen burner with a striker on the first try (the priorities of an overachieving 15 year-old). Academics and art were my yin and yang.

I enrolled in Mr. Phillip U. Davenport’s Intro to Photography class. PUD had a big presence, a mustachioed artist/cowboy, with a penchant for Tina Turner and the Bee Gees. He also bravely commandeered a school bus on the side. My fingernails were always torn, ragged from opening up those pesky metal canisters, blindly and nimbly wrapping the film around the metal spool in complete darkness, shake-shake-shaking, hands burning from the chemicals, and finally, sweet relief from the wash bath. Images that deftly manifested, competing for space on the overcrowded drying rack. Photoshop was not an option, hailed as the enemy and completely off-limits, we relied on endless test strips, dodging and burning, and precisely recording our development times down to the microsecond. Chemistry and art melded into one. I was in love.

I captured these images during fashion week with a Japanese 35mm camera from the 60s. I appreciate the obvious grains, the imperfections, and how I forgot to advance my film and got a creepy, ghostly doppelgänger effect at the Electric Feathers show. My love of photography has been rekindled, and I carry my janky old SLR around if I don’t have too much to juggle that day. I’m not determined to take the perfect photo, with impeccable focus and sharp lines. Accidental, experimental, haphazard, and dreamy are more my speed.

“We shall live again, shake out the ghost dance.” —Patti Smith