Beautiful Silver

I am about to turn inside out with the negatives that I developed today. I have only looked at them once and still they have hold of my memory. I accidentally loaded two sheets of film into the same slot of the developing tank and when I pulled them out to do my hypo-clear, there was a white spot on one of them. I called Rod at Photomark to see what I should do and ended up just having to fix it again. It is the most beautiful, promising, and haunting negative I have developed so far. I don't know what it is, but the image of it is still right there in front of my face. I noticed details in the shadow areas that I could've never seen on a 35mm negative and was elated to find that a million more ideas of how to shoot the same place occurred to me. I think I could spend weeks exploring downtown and making images that capture the beauty in the things that people normally just walk right by. I made a couple of other photographs that are of the top edges of buildings made from street level. I looked up at this old place on Monroe being remodeled and saw that all of the windows were open and a bare flagpole sat atop the empty structure. It seemed very much abandoned even though it was being repurposed, as if it was loosing something. Maybe it looked like it was crying in a way, but I am still not really sure. If I had the resources, I would love to travel to various big cities and take photographs of the old buildings that have been forgotten, or are being remade into new things, or the pieces of old buildings that you find in the new ones. I should look into getting a grant from the arts commission. You have no idea what it means to me as an artist to find that deep rooted excitement about making something beautiful that is just silver on film taken with a complicated and bulky apparatus that is like playing with your own mind. You can get lost in moving inside the image and around it and under and in front of it. You can let your intuition take over and forget about why you ever wanted to impress people. You simply are in it for the ecstasy of the moment you make a good photograph.