Wavelength

I could describe the past few years of my life with these four words: movement, distances, migration and wandering. I left Montreal, my hometown, to study in Toronto. I traveled back and forth between these cities to visit my friends and family for more than two years. To recover from this intense experience, I decided to leave for Berlin, a city I had been wanting to discover for so long. I needed to feel like a stranger and to be able to wander around without any fixed schedule related to work or deadline with respect to school. I was an alien in a city where I barely understood the language. I was free to wander around an incredible city where space and time seemed to collapse into each other. In Berlin, I had the chance to reconnect with myself. I was able to be creative again and, as a documentary filmmaker and a photographer, I felt the urge to play around with image and time again. At the Mauerpark Flea Market in Prenzlauer Berg, I found a beautiful 35mm Ihagee Exakta camera. Since that day, I’ve been carrying around this little camera everywhere with me. In Berlin, I found not only the exa camera, but I also found Michael, this amazing guy from San Diego, with whom I deeply fell in love with and who followed me to Montreal after I left Berlin. A few months after I got back to my hometown, it was my turn to follow the person I loved into a new city. I moved to San Francisco in July 2010, and since then, I got married, got a green card and a tons of new film cameras. In less than two years, so many unexpected events happened in my life that it is very exciting to think about what will come next. So when I went for a walk on the beach with my Exakta camera, that morning of August 2010, I had no clue that I was going to capture in one frame, the feelings I have been experiencing in the past few years. The distances, the months, the landscapes, the cultures, the unexpected encounters, they all blended into each other. All the movement between the cities and the continents, the physical experiences of time and space would be captured in one single image. As I was walking in the streets of the Outer sunset neighborhood and along Ocean Beach, I released the shutter and wound the camera without noticing that something wasn’t quite right. And when I dropped the roll of film at the lab a few days later, I didn’t know that the last 10 images would get stuck into one frame.

written by mel_saumure on 2011-03-24