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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching undertow
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there is always something (why I shoot film)


There are maybe ten shots left on the roll. Outside the metro, a collection of pigeons sit on minuscule ledges above two old men. They talk as all old men do, with operatic waves of their hands, sour expressions, belly laughs, eventually scratching their chins as they stare off at nothing in particular. I am pretending to take pictures of something near them, then swing across when they are not looking to shoot a few frames. At one point I surrender to the afternoon and move on.

And now, the courtyard that leads to the film lab. A great old building rests here, a school of architecture where students mill around dressed in black sucking on cigarettes with giant portfolios tucked under their arms. A young man approaches me. I am ready to tell him I have no idea what he is saying, but he wants to know where the film lab is. I jut my chin, telling him the door is just beyond a few bushes. He nods his thanks.

There are screens set up in a jagged line, sheathed in filthy white plastic to mark the edge of some construction. A woman struts black and forth, her arms tucked behind her back, wearing a rumpled white dress that flaps around in the same wind. I have a few frames left, and was just about ready to roll them into the camera unshot. I shake my head to myself at how foolish I was. There is always something to wrestle with. I think the woman knows I am taking pictures of her anxious white dress not the great old building but she does not really seem to care. I try to advance one more time and feel that familiar tug, the end of the roll. Street photography is always like fishing. You cannot escape the metaphors.

The film is rewound back into the can, and there is a jump in my step as I go inside to drop off and pick up. As I make my way down, I understand for the millionth time why I shoot film. If I did not, I would not have been here, would not have had to find some last shots for the roll, the woman in white, the old men, all of the way back to those tree stumps downstairs in a messy row, they all lead to this moment.
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