europe 23
15/05/23 - 11/08/23
In May of 2023, my girlfriend Margot and I set off on a three-month-long trip around Europe in our 1991 Volkswagen van, affectionately named: Frumpy. Despite spending the better part of a year researching and saving up for the trip, when the time came, I still opted for my patented 'decide on the day' approach, which, while stressful, served us relatively well and led to some unforgettable adventures. A couple of months before we left, I bought a Canon AE-1. Dubbed one of the first consumer cameras, it was mass-produced in the 70s and introduced millions to film photography, including myself, 52 years later. While playing around with it in preparation for our trip, I utterly fell in love with the way the images it produced looked, one of the reasons I bought it in the first place. I've always been a big fan of 35mm cinema, and it felt like a glimpse into that world. As a complete novice to film photography, it took me a little while to fully understand the process, leading to some rather embarrassing encounters. On a trip to Bristol with a friend, I was zooming around on a death stick (e-scooter) with my heavy Canon flailing about in a plastic shopping bag suspended from the handlebars, when the inevitable happened, and it smashed onto the tarmac below almost taking out the cyclist behind me. Upon initial inspection, all seemed well, until I looked through the viewfinder to find a crack stretching from one side to the other. Panicking, I took it to a camera shop in Cardiff before work the next day, where I asked if the sensor had smashed, to which the unenthusiastic guy behind the counter responded, "They don't have sensors".
My aim wasn't to take the most aesthetically appealing photos, but to use the camera in a way that a dad on holiday with his family might have done in the 70s, and see how I would react to all the extra steps it would involve compared to whipping out my phone. I am aware that as of late film cameras have been the subject of intense aestheticization by the younger generation online, and while it's easy to brand the idea of using something older and more complex as pointless, it's also important to remember we zoomers have been guided by computers our entire lives, so no wonder we're naturally drawn to the opposite, and call it 'authentic', when the alternative is most certainly not. I think the older we get, the more pronounced this phenomenon may become, someone should probably give it a name. Embarking on this trip was one of the biggest and most terrifying risks I've ever undertaken, I hope these images give you a sense of what roaming the earth in our beloved little tin can was like.
