Kim Fay

About using film (rather than a digital camera) to shoot the photographs for Communion, Julie Fay Ashborn writes:

It was a huge challenge to carry that many rolls of film through the many airports we went through. Not to mention trudging it around in the taxis and cyclos and trying to shove it all into the safes in some of the hotel rooms. The security guards at the airports wouldn’t hand-check the film so they thought I was crazy. I had these two lead bags that held about fifteen rolls each, so it was quite a spectacle for me to put the lead bags through the x-ray machine, have Kim take the film out, pass the bags back to me, fill them up, put them through and so on. I carried about 130 rolls of film throughout that trip.

Having said that, I look at some of those photos I took and they feel so much more personal to me because I only took one or two shots of something right as I observed it, and that is what I used. There is a true sense of anxiety and excitement about whether or not the photos would come out like I wanted them to—then having to wait through five weeks of travel and a long flight back to Los Angeles to get them to the lab to see what I shot. But when I looked through the photos and found that perfect photo, exactly how I envisioned it to be, it was so much more satisfying and worth all the hassle.

There is something richer and truer about film (I know it sound cliché, but it is true). I now shoot with a professional digital camera and I can take 100 shots to get that one great shot, so even a completely candid moment feels a bit staged because you aren’t really just “capturing” that one beautiful moment. I do believe film is better but … let me tell you, if I take another trip like that through a Southeast Asian country for five weeks, I will be bringing my digital, and all I will have to worry about are the memory cards!

Photos to come.