Reshaping Narratives Through Film Soups: Interview with Artist Daura Campos

Because of their experimental nature, alternative processes like film soups can understandably be a hit or miss. But film photographer Daura Campos embraces this uncertainty, crafting and unravelling stories not just through her photo subjects but throughout her whole photographic process.

Through her projects Secret Visibility and Once Upon a Pink Moon, she created vivid and abstract images to tackle an individual's relationship to home. While in Cloud Watching, she delves into our relationship with film photography as a tangible medium. What happens to discarded, unwanted film negatives and how can they be transformed into art?

Daura talks about that and more in this interview.

Hi, Daura! Welcome to the magazine. Can you tell us about yourself? When and how did you discover your love for film photography?

Hi! I'm Daura, a visual artist and photographer based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I moved here from a small town a few years ago for university and that is when I rediscovered film photography.

It was 2018, I was going to travel abroad for the first time to visit a friend and I wanted to make a record of the trip with something other than my phone. As a student, all I could afford was a vintage Canonet, so I made it work and haven't looked back since.

What do you like to shoot?

In my day to day, I love to photograph my loved ones, the clouds—I love a good low-angle shot—and the details of my surroundings. For my projects, I like to start thinking of the overarching subject matter and work from there regarding what I shoot and what ingredients I use in my film soups.

You've come up with some pretty amazing abstract work from your film soups! How did you start experimenting with film this way?

I started to photograph as a hobby, and when I chose to do it professionally I quickly became overwhelmed by the idea of the "perfect photograph", all the steps you have to take, and the rules you must follow to achieve that result. This started to dwindle my love for the process, which was why I chose this as a career in the first place.

Because of that, I started to research alternative ways to work with film, and that's when I found film soup. I must acknowledge that the Lomography recipes were my road map when I first started and still are one of the resources that I always share with my students – so thank you!

Where do you get inspiration from or ideas for film soup recipes? Can you give us a brief explanation of your creative process?

Once I grasped the film soup process, I began experimenting with ways to make the ingredients flow with both my photographs and their subject matter. For a project to succeed, these elements must work together as one. A key part of my approach is treating the film as a reactive being that not only holds the image's information but is also affected by its context.

My process starts by observing recurring themes in my community or issues of the time. I research artists who have worked with similar themes and journal to reflect on how I can add to the conversation. From there, I decide what I am going to photograph and which ingredients I will use. This is where most of the experimentation takes place, I try out different recipes, ingredient proportions, and soaking time before I reach the point of selecting the images.

During the pandemic, I developed two bodies of work— Secret Visibility and Once Upon a Pink Moon —that explore our relationship with home. I photographed the spaces in my house and used everyday Brazilian ingredients to cook the film. Another example is, when I create portraits, I ask the person about their favorite ingredients (from spices to tea) and find a way to incorporate them into the film soup.

Have you experienced some struggles related to the pursuit of an alternative process like film soup? For example, results you perhaps didn't like much, errors made along the way, etc. How do you approach the unpredictable nature of film soups?

For sure! If we were to view my archive of unused scans you would most definitely need to take a breather. I think that the many mistakes I made when teaching myself to shoot film, primed me for the anxiety that a lot of people have when they first encounter the film soup process. Because I soup my film before developing, I don't have the same attachment to the souped images, that I have with my other photographs. Their "destroyed" nature is all I know.

That said, the slow pace of the film soup process has been a significant challenge and a real learning curve—because there is no way to rush it. From the moment I take the photograph to when the film scans are finally uploaded to my computer, it typically takes between one to two months. And for a project to be "finished" can easily take between six months and two years (possibly forever?). It is a constant practice of letting go.

Can you also tell us about your project Cloud Watching? Where did you get the inspiration from it and how is it going so far?

So, you know how film processing labs will have a time window for you to pick up your negatives before they become trash? That's where it all started.

I learned that there are many reasons why that is. Ironically, a lot of people only care about digital files, some forget that the negatives were even stored in the first place, and others cut ties with those in the photographs and don't want to have those images occupy space in their lives.

I began to reflect on how this contrasts with one of the purposes of film photography: to capture cherished memories in a tangible form. It made me realize that while our feelings toward what we photograph may be universal, they change over time. Cloud Watching is my attempt to document this shift on a global scale.

To do this, I have been gathering discarded negatives by going to flea markets internationally, connecting with people online, and collaborating with Kodak Mafia, a film lab in São Paulo—the largest city in Latin America—that has supported my early film soup work. With the negatives in hand, I partially remove their emulsion and create abstract versions of the images, reshaping their narrative through artistic alchemy.

Do you have some favorite results from this project?

The most common request I get is to make the people in the photographs unrecognizable, for both legal and privacy reasons. Because of that, I’ve been exploring the balance between how much to reveal and how much to conceal. Of course, I can’t use a straightforward portrait, but what if I abstract it enough so it’s unidentifiable? What if I dissolve most of the image but leave just a torso? Or even just the outline of a body? I find it really fun, this secret we share.

Talking about film in general, are there still other processes you'd like to try out, or any dream project you'd like to work on?

A big dream of mine is to develop an experimental film stock—that would be incredible! I find the LomoChrome Purple incredibly inspiring. I'm big on color—as you can see in my work—so I believe a film that prioritizes it as its primary effect is so special. I would love to create a film that makes each frame unique and reflective of the moment in which it was captured beyond the content itself, similar to my film soup process.

Lastly, do you have any existing or upcoming projects you'd like for the community to know about?

I'm accepting film negative donations to Cloud Watching until the foreseeable future! If you are interested, please reach out via e-mail (daura@dauracampos.com) or Instagram. Thank you!

We'd like to thank Daura for sharing her work with us! To view more, visit her website and Instagram Page.

written by sylvann on 2024-11-12 #people #alternative-processes #film-soups #daura-campos