Feeling a bit better today—stiff and tender but not incapacitated. I made an odd dinner that gave us a tummy ache (why? I don’t know why… all the same foods we eat often prepared in the usual way… shrug) but that too eased up. Good grief I’m a mess this week—looking forward to holidays!
Anyway after recovering from my subpar cooking I was struck by a thought I’d had yesterday. I was driving down 17th and the auto body shop light there is so cool I thought “I should come back and take a photo with my instant camera.” I started thinking today about all the different red lights of nighttime Calgary and I decided to just do this thing.
So I went to a bunch of favourite spots to snap some photos and I’m really happy with how they turned out.
It’s an incredibly beautiful night in Calgary—warm with a gentle breeze, reminding me of many traditional brown Chinook Calgary Christmases from my childhood, adolescence, and on visits back from Montreal.
My Glass Clouds project is, I guess, street photography of a sort, but that one’s so specific that I realize I haven’t been thinking of it that way. This instant photo project is firmly definitely on the ground, in the thick of it. There seems to be something nostalgic about these ones from the moment the film starts developing.
I really love Calgary. I think it’s so beautiful and homey. I’ve been pretty grumpy with it the past little while so it’s nice to get out with a camera on a gorgeous night and reconnect, feel that comfort and happiness of being in the place I want to be anew again.
The next step will be to organize them in the best order for display and mount them on raw canvas. They’re going to go with a set of overexposed photos from Glenmore Park that I took earlier this year.
I’m really into the idea of these photos that exists in a single original copy only—I think that’s an interesting thing to explore given how radically photography had changed in the course of my lifetime. I feel like there’s something special about the instant photos. If nothing else, taking them certainly feels special.
And at last—to bed!