Hyde Park, London 2018

I write to express my feelings: the bed-side thoughts that keep me up on quaint nights, or troubles that cloud my head every passing hour. Or things that I want to remember: the nice cosy cafe by Russell Square station I’ve walked past one early evening or that one night I’ve strolled across the empty park under the biggest full moon ever. When I write stuff like these I try to write them with an immense amount of detail, because to me writing is a way to keep track of things. A way of not forgetting things. I am not going to lie about this pastime of mine by prefacing all my writing with a notion that I derive happiness from simply the act of creating or imagining something. To be ultimately frank I write to remember. Hence my ability to write or lack thereof springs from my desire to keep things intact in my memory. Like a paraphernalia for old and lost moments in my life I often forget about. For some time though, writing was insufficient in capturing everything I want to keep in my memories. Sure, I could describe indefinitely about how I was entranced by the reflection of the moon rippling across the lake or that one stranger I came across who had the oddest-looking boots; but sometimes there were limitations to which I can describe about things I can distinctly recall. So I was looking for other platforms of expression, and somehow I stumbled into lomo cameras.

I have mentioned multiple times on my blog that I am a very analog-obsessed person; I like everything from crumbling old love letters — even if they aren’t addressed to me — to rusty gold-rimmed clocks. I could say that simply the traces of age the items harbor make them different from the modern times, where everything is swift and easy. We can access everything nowadays with a click, press, and a swipe. Nothing was easy back then. Everything had to be thought of countless times before the backlit feeling of the heart could be expressed. It is harder, but hence more thoughtful. The years of hand-held evidence feels different; it just seems more heartfelt and dear. Lomo cameras — analog cameras, so called — use rolls of film to process photographs. And to process film, you would usually have to wait an average of three days. It seems like an agonizing wait for a set of thirty-six photos, but the beauty of time makes up for it. Just imagine taking pictures of the things that you love and thinking and recalling about them for three nights before facing them once again. It is slow, but it feels more precious that way. You learn to appreciate the act of remembering.

In contrary to my previously explained love for lomography however, my first roll turned out to be a disaster. I did not know (although I should have known) that you weren’t supposed to open the back of the camera with the film still rolling — or however professionally you’d phrase that — and exposed my film too early. I ended up losing one-third of my photos. It was a shame, but to be fair the rest of the photos that I’ve managed to salvage were not as exceptional either. I’m satisfied with the few photos, considering that this had been my trial shots. The three photos I have uploaded are my favorite shots (actually the only decent ones in the entire roll), all taken from Hyde Park. I have been to every corner in Fitzrovia street to Hyde Park, but those three were my most memorable ones. The soft-spoken conversation that the couple sitting on the bench was having, the genuine looks they were exchanging — there is an element of intimacy in that moment. It is a feeling that I can never describe fully in words.

One good thing about analog camera is that there is rarely a need to edit them. I usually edit and fix my photos here and there when I use my digital camera — sometimes so drastically that I’d only need a quarter of what I have actually taken. I’d have to edit the brightness or contrast to fully bring out the colors and feelings I was looking with when I was taking the photos. Films capture the moment itself. Its lens has a layer of antiquity marked by a bona fide feeling of sincerity. And that is something I hope to acquire when I look back on my memories — an unfeigned honesty with a hint of wholeheartedness — not with a perfunctory, prompt acknowledgment of past events.