Andrew Molitor gave one of my things way more attention than it probably deserves, and I’m flattered beyond any sense of reason or propriety. (And full disclosure, I know Molitor a little bit and am therefore predisposed to pretty much like pretty much anything he does. Anyway.) In his review, he mentions that my Eid al Adha zine contains 31 pictures—nearly the whole roll—and more or less correctly assumes that the ones I left out were “the ones that were literally unsalvageable.”
So, here, because I’m still too busy to write a proper post, are The Rejects.
Why were these rejected when I included so much other schlock? Search me.
I completely missed focus on several due to my impatience and seeming inability to check focus on scale focus cameras like the Lomo LC-A. Others didn’t quite fit with the narrative… Full disclosure, again, while the original zine looks more or less chronological, it’s not, or not quite anyway. I swapped a few around to make it look like I shot more regularly throughout the day than I did. And some others of the above simply couldn’t be worked into the flow or would make the zine too long. After all, given the construction of the LC-A and the relative generosity of filmmakers back prior to the rise of Digital, I eeked 40 images out of the roll, and including even 3/4 was probably a bit much.
I take one quibble with Molitor: he describes the shooting/making of Eid al Adha on Expired Film as “some dude dicking around with shitty film in a worse camera.”
He’s of course right to say that I’m just some dude dicking around, and that the 23 year expired, Ferrania-made Lomo 800 is, properly speaking, shitty film (though it worked out pretty well, I think), but for my money—and I’ve spent quite a bit of it on three copies, one of which went to the Ukraine for repairs that cost as much as a fourth copy would’ve—the LC-A is actually quite a decent little camera.
Anyway. Really, though, go give Molitor’s essay (and blog) a read. He has some Important things to say and, in this instance, used my dicking around with shitty film and a(n arguably) decent camera to do it.
Oh, and I made another zine of these rejects… Why? Search me. It’s print-ready and short: just 9 images on 3 double-sided pages.
