Welcome to My ANALOG AUGUST...

I admit: were it not for the alliteration, I’d likely not have considered this idea.

Analog August.

It even looks good in writing. Kind of feels like the title to an epic World War I novel. Or the biography of a recently exhumed 18th-century German composer. Who composed blind. With a polio limp. Rumored to be a closet homosexual. Father of 10, three of whom survived into their teens. Broad shouldered, always scowling, hair unkempt. First cousin of Frederick the Great. That’s it.

Analog August.

Once the alliterative spell was cast, I made a decision: I’ll spend the month of August completely analog. As completely as an online forum allows, that is.

Kind of like a dry January. Not that I ever lasted the full month, or even a full week, but that’s the idea. No Fuji, no Olympus, no posting of digital work. Instead, I’ll commit these dog days to my darkroom printing and the few processes I’ve been dabbling in, like cyanotype and photogravure printing.

The truth is, I’ve been limping over to the analog side of the equation for nearly two years now. Year over year, since 2024, my Lightroom catalogs have been shrinking in what they hold. I’ve gone entire months these past two years without lifting my Fuji or Olympus in favor of my Pentax 645, or Leica M6, or light-box where I expose my cyanotypes, or work-table where I sew and glue together my zines and accordion books.

And starting last July, after a triggering incident I experienced in relation to my stepson’s suicide of many years earlier, I launched into a several-month project that resulted in an exhibition of my photos, and the making of a hand-bound photo essay book on his death for the exhibition. The process of working week after week on the book — printing photographs, sequencing, testing papers, learning Japanese Stab Binding, framing, displaying, presenting — felt restorative. It slowed me down, allowed me to be alone for hours at a time with music, an audio book, or in silence with my thoughts.

Not exactly true. “Silence” is a bit of a misnomer. My wife informed recently that she could hear the squeak of my guillotine paper cutter at all hours throughout the house, along with my more-than-occasional “WHY THE FUCK isn’t this working?" (Yes, she has hearing that can differentiate ALL CAPS.)

So maybe silence isn’t the right word. But as a whole, the process FELT QUIETER.

For every turn there’s a season. Or as the 17th greatest rock lyric of all time goes, Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, and everything that dies, someday comes back.

This season won’t last forever. I’ll be back out with my digital cameras soon enough, but it feels good to flow with analog right now.

So I’ll spend August here making new work and sharing some of the old-school processes that I’ve been doing.

I suspect that the therapy I’ve been in these past two years — for the first time in many, many years — is playing a role in this change. I’ve been trying to sort out various things, like aging, and purpose, and legacy, and marriage, and fatherhood, and grief. I went from meeting with my behavioral therapist weekly, to bi-weekly, to monthly and now bi-monthly. Look, ma, my learning curve! It’s eye-opening what a professional who takes insurance and who listens to you can do for your vision.

(See what I did there?)

Correlation . . . causation — don’t ask me — but somewhere between those sessions, I pulled myself off the streets and found a greater comfort — at least for now — in the darkroom, in my workroom, and on occasional day trips with my emulsion-inclined friends.

Plus this: I’ve got many thousands of photographs and images on my server. Why do I need to be making thousands more? I barely have a sense of what I’ve got. I now have a sense of what Elon Musk must be experiencing with his kids.

So I’ve been spending this time revisiting a decade of photo walks, turning some into printed books, and setting aside some for future projects TBD. It felt absurd, in the way of a Stanley-Kubrick-makes-identical-twin-babies-with-The-Coen-Brothers vibe, to go out day after day, shooting, shooting, shooting, then saving, saving, saving, then forgetting, forgetting, forgetting.

Film, and virtually everything analog, is expensive, and therefore slower. Developing is slow. Darkroom printing is really expensive, and therefore really slower. It’s my way of trying to better appreciate what I’ve made so far. And a reason to keep my paid subscriptions active.

It’s not nostalgia, as some might think. I didn’t own a real camera before I purchased my first digital Olympus Pen-F in 2017. Analog is new to me. Nothing about it gives me sepia dreams of when gas was 29 cents a gallon and America was still a great nation making water fountains, diners, and schools exclusively for the likes of me. I have nostalgia for Roberto Clemente and for the days when I thought Elton John was singing “electric boobs” in “Bennie and the Jets.” No nostalgia with film photography.

My analog crush has to do with wanting to slow down my thinking, be intentional in what I’m doing, and produce things that I can touch. And give to someone when I die. Who’d want an obsolete Korean-made hard drive when they can inherit a book with 17 photos and an authentic Japanese Stab binding that I sewed with my own fingers?

Printing the digital pics myself, sequencing them on the floor, and crafting a binding to hold them feels right. One day it won’t, but for now it does.Not to mention the educational value. How can I understand or talk about a Man Ray or Graciela Iturbide photograph if I’ve never tried to make one myself?

Over the next 30 days I’ll be posting my film work — prints and scans (yes, I’m no analog purist). I’ll be sharing my photobooks, a few accordion books, a handful of my cyanotype projects. We’ll see what else.

I hope this alliterative phase proves worthy of your eyes, which — as I remind myself every day — I’m extremely grateful for.

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