bringing some cinema to lockdown
Much like the rest of the country I’m currently struggling in this lockdown. I’m bored of taking the same silly little walks around my silly little neighbourhood in almost universally bleak weather, and failing to find anything that sparks joy. So at the beginning of the year I was inspired by photographer Jack Munsch to pay the pain away and treat myself to a new camera.
The Panorama Wide Pic is a kiddy alternative to the eye-wateringly expensive hardcore wide-angle analogue cameras out there, offering a panoramic fix through cropping every frame into cinematic dimensions. (The classy camera approach is spreading the image over two frames of film.) Why not simply shoot with a camera you already own and crop in post, you ask? Because it is lockdown, and everything is terrible so let me have this.
Spending hours bidding unreasonably low sums for analogue cameras on eBay was a favourite activity of my teenage years, so I snapped up a Panorama Wide Pic in a ridiculous bright red for £7 plus P&P. I had forgotten the simple pleasures of receiving a bubble-wrapped camera in the post, loading it up and marching out to shoot a whole roll in one go on a sunny day - in this case my favourite tungsten film Cinestill 800T.
Most cameras going for a low price on eBay are untested, so it’s best to shoot a first roll as fast as possible and not imbue too many hopes and dreams into the results in case the files return full of light leaks or completely blank. Seeing as I was using this camera on some of the only sun I’d be seeing this month, I took it out in combination with other tried and tested repositories for my hopes and dreams. Because it is lockdown! And joy must be created purposefully.
I shot the roll over two days, walking with my mum and then an old local friend through the surrounding environs of my mum’s house, and in our childhood park. Because the camera feels like a disposable and the aim was for some cinema, I went for landscapes and lightplay, and didn’t think too carefully about what I shot. But it did in fact end up making me look harder at places and buildings and scenes that have become omnipresent and familiar - never more so than over these lockdowns.
One of the great joys of photography is forcing yourself to see the world afresh. My cousin has always said that she loves to walk with me through cities she knows well, and watch what I stop to photograph (as anyone in my life must learn to tolerate), because it makes her see things through my eyes, and look twice. And that is what going out purposefully armed with a camera does to me too - it reminds me to look harder, longer, more thoughtfully.
I wasn’t expecting much from this camera, but I love these images. I love the drama and the atmosphere that the film and the crop have evoked, and I love the way that I can look at them and feel something. They make me observe my neighbourhood in a different light, bring some cinema to the truly everyday. And looking at them reminds me that as bleak and boring as this period has been, it happened, time passed, and I existed and made things within it.
