I felt inspired to pick up my first film camera in 2019 after reading Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. It was a $35 Canon Sure Shot I bought after winning a short bidding war on eBay. Truthfully, I didn't know much about the Sure Shot, or photography in general for that matter, but I quickly became captivated by "reading" photographs and exploring the narratives woven through them. Once I began to study photographers on my own and discovered some of my favorites such as Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Merry Alpern, Shirin Neshat, and Ansel Adams, I realized that I was particularly fascinated by the voyeuristic power of photography. 

I became intrigued by the psychological and sociological dimensions of photography and the ways photos allow us to reflect on and construct new memories and relations to our surroundings. I fell in love with the tactile nature of film photography, the feeling of being able to stamp flashes of moments onto film and having time returned to me in the form of developed photos. I love the mechanical whirl of the film shifting inside the camera every time I tap the shutter button and the squeaky slipperiness of the film embedded with silhouetted memories.

Over time, my film camera has become a physical extension of my mind, a third eye. I started off with the intention to practice street photography, but my film camera quickly replaced my digital camera and I started photographing and archiving anything I thought I would want to remember if my memory were to fail me. Although I thought I was practicing photography out of a deep curiosity about the world and the people populating it, I realized that I have just as much to learn about myself as I do others when I photograph the things I see and how I see them.