In high school I fell in love with black and white photography (among other things). Every aspect of creating photographs intrigued and inspired me. I was enchanted. How could something so simple as a piece of paper coated in chemicals create such beautiful images, just because it was exposed to light? I took classes and learned how to develop my own film, and spent hours in the darkroom, eager to create my own photographs, pictures that magically appeared on paper before my very eyes, in the dark, under red light, sitting in a chemical bath.

I still have the negatives that came from so many hours in the high school darkroom, which has now been transformed into the most beautiful darkroom I have ever seen (due to renovations to the school). I’m jealous of the students who get to use it. But I also wish they could have seen the old darkroom, it’s creepy hallway, the ghostly feeling one would get that someone was in there, watching you, in the dark, all by yourself.Anyway, this led me to pursue a hobby in photography when I went off to college, thanks in part to my parents who bought me my first Ricoh, a simple SLR (single lens reflex), which still works but has since been retired and replaced so to speak by my Nikon D60 digital.

The Ricoh is still the best little camera that anyone could ever own. Well, the best film camera anyway. It takes such awesome photographs. But its strength is also its drawback. I can take pictures with it, but I would have to develop the photos at a photo shop, seeing as I don’t have a darkroom and have no access to one anymore since graduating from college. I have darkroom equipment, an enlarger and all the fixings that go with one, but no space to actually create one. Someday, I will have my own darkroom again, and then the ricoh can come out of hiding and produce the masterpieces that the Nikon just can’t do. But until that day, I am a digital girl, in a digital world, and so are my pictures.

In college I developed an “eye” for photography. I started to “see” the world as if it were a photograph, as if all the moments of my world could be photographed. And I would often get out my camera, if I had it on me, and take photos. But the ricoh is no small camera, and taking it around with me required some skill, as I had to keep it from hitting things as I walked, or carry a purse big enough to fit it in. I have the same problem with my nikon. Great cameras, just way too big for everyday, spur of the moment type of photos. I guess my iphone camera has come in handy for these types of momentary shots, and I’ve come to enjoy the “tea time” photos I take every day of the quotes I find on my Yogi tea tags. But the iphone camera is not great. It’s okay for web photos and things, but for real photography, it does lack some quality.

My eye for photos is always searching out the world in front of me, beside me, looking for the things that I might overlook; the simple things that go unnoticed by someone who doesn’t care to stop and really look at their world. And sometimes, I don’t have a camera on me when I want to take a picture. Sometimes the moment would be ruined if I took out a camera to document the event. These are the moments that I really wish I had on film, but they’re also the moments that would never have occurred with a camera in the mix.

And so I give you a written account of the photographs that don’t exist except in my own memory, moments of time that maybe could never be fully captured by a photograph but can live instead through my own words, which are in themselves like a photograph painted with words.

The picture I didn’t take, #1:
I stood watching as Jenn crouched in the barn against the wall, writing in a notebook. It was raining outside and the sky was grey, and yet light fell beautifully across her face–illuminating it. I stood there, holding my camera, knowing that if I took that picture, it would be one I would treasure– but any movement might have ruined the moment. Even a click of the camera–so instead of a real picture I have saved the mental picture instead. (my friend, jenn, who rides horses, used to take care of horses at a farm in Durham, NH. I went with her one day to take photos. Although I did take some very nice pictures of horses that day, and her, this is one of the moments that I remember, which never made its way to film.)

I have many more where this came from. I’ve written some of them down, and the others I just remember as being things that I would like to take pictures of, but just never did. I will share with you these moments, if you like, and I would love to hear about the moments of your own lives, that somehow should have been captured as a photo, but never were. But you can still remember every detail, every nuance of the event, or the place, or the time, and your words can paint the picture better than chemicals on paper ever could.