We’re in double figures now! I received this film last month and got the film back yesterday. It’s a real mixed bag of photographs, moreso than any other film I’ve received so far. It ranges from a karate competition to a holiday in Spain to a band practice, and others beside. Here are my picks:



I love this photograph for many reasons. Obviously it’s a very aesthetically pleasing photograph. The colours are beautiful and vivid and the composition is attractive. It looks to me like a 1980s postcard advertising an exotic holiday destination. These are the types of image that photographer trying to emulate the ‘snapshot aesthetic’ are striving to produce but it’s incredibly difficult to fake these kinds of effects, at least without using digital manipulation. It delights me that something that people go to great lengths to imitate is produced accidentally by amateur photographers. One of my favourite things about this project is that I’m building such a rich archive of this type of photograph.

This is a photograph from the karate competition documented on this film. The rest of them are fairly standard shots of the competition (that’s not to say they lack interest, far from it) but this one looks like some kind of dance routine involving tigers, which is fairly amusing in itself, not least because all of the dancers seem to be doing something completely different. All of the photographs of the competition are really really grainy, much more so than the rest of the film. I understand that it was shot indoors but I wouldn’t have thought that would have produced that much extra grain, especially when there are other images shot indoors at the end of the film that aren’t this grainy.

This photograph is indicative that the karate competition took place in Spain (the sign in the background of this image confirms that they were in Valencia). To have traveled to Spain to partake in the competition would suggest that the competitor was particularly skilled, and would probably be interested to see these photographs, if it’s not the photographer him/herself. I often find myself wondering why a film was never developed by it’s original owner when the images on it are so interesting and frequently very personal.



This photograph and another one of the same dog don’t seem to fit with anything else on the film. I get the impression that the camera that this film was in was passed from person to person, making it’s way to Spain and back at some point, because there seems to be very little in common between many of the images on it. Alongside the photographs of the band practice, these photographs look like an attempt to finish up a film so it can be developed to get hold of the earlier images on it, which I think everyone has done at some point.


One of my favourite aspects of this film is that you can read a lot more into it when you look at the small details. For instance, a bit of Googling revealed that the holiday snapshots were taken in Valencia, in Spain. And the karate photographs being interspersed with those indicates that it took place in Spain.

To view the full film, check out the set on Flickr