Her

My earliest memory and lessons learned while shooting in 0 °F.

Self-portrait. January 2023.

On Christmas Day, 2022, I went outside to make some pictures. I was visiting my childhood home in Wisconsin, the place my family moved to when I was four years old—an event that coincides with my earliest conscious memory.

In this memory, I am sitting in a beam of sun on the living room floor amidst a scatter of unopened cardboard boxes. My younger brother is drinking milk out of a sippy cup nearby, and even though the light is golden through the tiny hairs on my arm, in my memory, everything is tinted blue like one of Tarkovsky’s polaroids. This is the moment at which I feel I truly become “switched on” as a person: bathed in iridescent light while the periphery around me starkly fades to pitch black. Like a stage with a single spotlight. Or a projector casting out images inside a darkened room.

My recollections before this time are all dim and murky. This is probably because we lived in a house shrouded by dense woods before swapping it for lush, open fields, and why the memory stands out in such vivid contrast. Somewhere in me, I was starved for unencumbered light, and once I got a taste of it, I immediately wanted more.

Because I am older and a girl, I got the big bedroom on the upper, south-facing side of our two-story farmhouse. From my roost, I had a near-panoramic view of the surrounding cornfields (which, upon the release of Signs when I was thirteen, haunted me to my core). In the morning I awoke to light, and at night I watched it set, and in between I watched it move in a wide arc across the sky, which was sometimes blue or gray or clotted with cream, sheep-shaped clouds. Over the years, I have spent a considerable amount of time in that room with the wide-angled view, writing and crying and making a general mess of things. My bird’s nest. My light box.

Self-portrait as a plant my mom keeps in my childhood bedroom. December 2022.

Cut to Christmas Day: I opened the front door and stepped outside onto the deck and into the brittle air. Despite the temperature hovering just above 0 degrees Fahrenheit, I wanted to get out and make some pictures. In particular, I wanted to get a picture of Her.

Days-old snow crackled beneath my boots as I trudged down the steps and shuffled with my green Michelin Man coat along the driveway, camera slung and gently swaying from my neck. I wondered what would be the best angle to capture Her—or if she would even come out for me at all. She’d been half-sunken all day.

I walked towards the big evergreen, the one my dad planted along with a bazillion others back when my brother and I were in elementary school, both to provide shelter from the wind and privacy from any onlooker to come our way. The trees were planted as saplings, but now they loom large, like giant guardians over the land. Some of the evergreens have a slightly blue wash to their needles, and I have always found it exquisite.

I stopped to admire the daggers of ice descending from the house’s overhang before turning to get a better look at the floating boughs laden with snow. With a satisfying ting, I popped open the viewfinder on my camera. My breath immediately fogged the glass as I peered down into it. I waited for the condensation to clear, and then an image appeared. Before me, but in reverse, I saw the tree cushioned by snow in the foreground, while further out, a set of pines stood like a quick artist’s sketch on the horizon. To one side, barely visible, I saw Her.

My pulse began to quicken with the excitement that comes whenever I feel I’m about to make a photograph. My fingers, slow from the cold even with gloves on, fumbled with the focus knob. But first: I needed to get the composition. After kneeling, then standing, then leaning back before kind of awkwardly squatting somewhere in between, I found an angle I hoped would work. I reset the focus; checked to make sure the dark slide was out; checked the dark slide again; adjusted the aperture and picked a new shutter speed; set the focus one more time… Then I inhaled, my finger resting expectantly on the shutter release button, and held my breath and body as still as I could.

A word about my camera: She is a medium format film camera. In particular, a Mamiya RB67. “Arby” for short. I got her from Blue Moon Camera & Machine in Portland, Oregon in 2019 when Will and I lived there. Jake, the owner of Blue Moon, sold me on her. “You’ll have to go slowly with this one,” he told me. Perfect, I thought. That’s just what I need. Back then, with my smaller 35mm cameras, I tended to rush the process, skirting around the more technical aspects that always flummoxed me. (More on this some other time.) By the autumn of 2019, though, I’d resolved to become a more intentional, technically-sound film photographer and felt that the Mamiya, a fully manual camera with nothing to fall back on—no aperture priority, no built-in light meter—would help me get there. “Oh,” Jake added, “and you’re gonna want to use a tripod.”

“A tank,” everyone (primarily men of a certain vintage) tells me whenever they find out I shoot with an RB67. “A howitzer,” one guy said.

They’re not wrong. It’s part of what I love about my Arby. She’s built to withstand the test of time. If I dropped her cold metal body on the concrete, I’d be concerned for the concrete. “You’ll get strong carrying that brick around all day!”

Of course, a tripod certainly makes things easier. The RB67 is heavy, and it would behoove me to shoot using one more often, both for my wrists’ sake and to get crisper pictures. But due to my whimsical nature, aka I’m still impatient and change my mind a lot, combined with a less-than-functional tripod itself, 90% of the time, I resort to balancing the little howitzer on my knee or levitating it mid-air, like the basket of a hot air balloon, using either a neck strap or one hand planted firmly underneath.

A word about naming things: It’s interesting to me how people usually (not always, but usually) give objects, especially things like cameras and guitars, designated-female names. Arby, like Al, is a bit more gender-neutral. But more often than not, it’s something akin to Lucille or Grace. Eloise. No one ever names their guitar Greg. Even Will’s resonator guitar is named Elizabeth, after Elizabeth Cotten. The whole thing feels fairly misogynistic until you stop to consider that the feminine is inherently creative. The female body, conventionally speaking, is the only physical form capable of ushering new life into this world. There are exceptions, of course, and sex designation, like gender identity, is more fluid and nuanced than has traditionally been accepted; anyone with functioning ovaries and a uterus could feasibly choose to give birth to a child, and gender non-conforming pregnancies exist, period.

But going back, it makes sense, in a way, that objects such as cameras and guitars are bestowed with names typically indicative of that raw, creative energy. They are vessels for transforming something that was merely a thought or feeling into being. A picture is created when a small amount of light collides with silver halide particles suspended in a gelatinous film stretched taut inside the body of a camera, forming an image. A song moves through the smooth wooden chamber of a guitar as if pulled from the ether into notes and chords, dictating a song. Likewise, when I think of the sun, Herself¹, I imagine a powerful, feminine force radiating her life-giving light over everything. Even when she is shy, clouded-out, and wanly flickering, she remains a constant presence in all our lives.

In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, The Sun, as illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, depicts a child riding naked atop a horse’s bare back, surrounded by sunflowers and overseen by a benevolent sun. It is a symbol of renewal and fresh beginnings, creative fertility, and illumination. The Sun is divine light bursting forth onto the world’s stage, revealing truths previously concealed in darkness. As a child of summer, born under Leo at midday, I strongly resonate with this card. I still recall the first time I ever saw it—the night of November 16th, 2011. It was the night I met Will, and we were waiting for the bus, huddled beneath an awning while strings of rain streamed down around us. Will pulled a tarot deck from his backpack and told me to pick a card. I hovered my fingers over the cards he held splayed before me before carefully choosing one. I flipped it over—it was The Sun. Will softly shook his head, a funny smile spreading across his face. “Good card,” he said, almost to himself.

Looking down into the viewfinder, my breath still making ghosts on the glass, I saw Her—there but barely. The sallow sky had all but swallowed her up, though she still peeked through periodically as if to say, I’m here. Even if you can’t always see me. Even if I’m feeling quiet and don’t want to be seen. I’m still here. Don’t forget.

Winter sun. Christmas Day, 2022.

I pressed the shutter release button and made a picture. Then I made another, for good measure, and turned and scurried back inside, my fingers fishing frozenly for the metal dark slide in my coat pocket. I rotated the back (RB = rotating back) to landscape, slipped the dark slide into its film holder, and then sat at the dining room table, cheeks rosy, waiting for my hands and feet to warm up. After ten minutes or so, I went back outside to finish my roll of film. By then, the sun had already vanished, so I looked for something else to seize my attention.

I walked to the end of the driveway. Opposite the road, our neighbor’s field stretched frozen, stubby rows of cornstalks sporadically jutting through the shiny layers of snow and ice. I remembered the pictures Will and I took there on our wedding day in 2016. Even though we probably weren’t supposed to be in that field, the light was just right, and we asked our photographer to take a few black and white polaroids of us before it disappeared. In one photograph, we are running, hands held, toward the swiftly setting sun, our hair (both long at the time) swirling out behind us. Of all our wedding photos, it is probably my favorite.

Shrine. January 2023. (Cropped)

The field evaporated from view as I turned and traipsed along the row of pines through a snowdrift to reach an outstretched branch I thought looked cool. I removed the dark slide and checked that the film was advanced and the shutter cocked. I opened the viewfinder and peered down into it, composing a scene. When I felt I’d latched onto something special, I dialed in the focus, lay my finger on the shutter release button, and then—nothing.

I pressed the button again.

Nope.

I tried again. Uh-uh. Not working.

For some reason, the shutter wasn’t firing. It’d been working fine earlier. But somehow, between the time I went inside to warm up and came back out, something had changed.

Wtf??

I checked the dark slide again (seriously, how many times can I check this thing?), then took off my gloves and messed with my camera in a way that produced zero tangible results. Imagine a squirrel attempting to build a snowman, his little hands fruitlessly patting loose snow into helpless shapes. That was me, that is me, whenever anything technical goes wrong and I have to troubleshoot how to fix it, complete with a pained squirrel expression on my face. “How? How does this work? Am I doing it??”

My fingers were numb from running my bare hands uselessly over my camera, so I packed up and went inside. I Googled. I lamented to my family, who also Googled. The results were mixed. Similar to how if you start Googling a health concern, you end up diagnosing yourself with something fatal—the same holds for any camera issue. Well, I guess that’s it then. Farewell, dear friend. We had a good run!

After much searching, I concluded that the stubborn shutter release button probably had something to do with the near-negative temperature. Maybe when I stepped inside to warm up, something inside my camera had warmed up, too, creating moisture, and when I went back outside, it instantly froze, locking something in place. The only thing to do would be to wait for whatever was frozen to thaw. Leave it alone. Let it be.

Back home in Saint Paul, a few hours later, I could not let it be. I took the whole gosh darn thing apart (or at least, the parts I knew I could get back together). I had to see, to know, what was wrong so that I could fix it, or if not, fixate obsessively—a common theme in other areas of my life now masterfully transferred onto my photography practice.

I couldn’t figure it out. The whole thing was beyond me. Bleary-eyed, bathed in blue light from my laptop, I searched for camera repair stores to visit later that week.

With a heavy heart, I reassembled my Arby. First the viewfinder, then the film holder, then the lens. I readjusted the rotating back and tested the shutter release button again, just for kicks—I’d already taken the film out; even though the roll wasn’t finished, to me it was over—and then… it worked?

I rapidly tested several blank shots, and IT WORKED! Something about taking my little barrel apart and putting her back together must have realigned whatever was out of whack! I later learned the issue had to do with the rotating back function. Because of the cold, the rotation was stiff whenever I turned it and hadn’t fully locked into place, even though I thought it was, preventing me from making a picture. I had no idea this was something that could even occur! It had never happened to me before, yet I felt almost embarrassed that something so simple had thwarted me.

Afterward, I felt a swell of gratitude for my camera’s robust body and for the photographic process itself. Photography never fails to teach me the value of not just patience and keeping your cool but constant learning. Just when I think, Man, I’m really getting the hang of this, I’m reminded of how much I still have to learn. It’s humbling.

Do I always embrace this? Not at all. My perfectionist self still squirms at the fact that to learn and grow I often have to make mistakes or do things badly, whether it’s practically imperceptible or presented to me on a silver platter. Yet, the discomfort I feel when this happens lets me know I’m on the right track.

Maybe that’s why, besides just enjoying making images, I keep putting rolls of film in my camera. Subconsciously I know that if I keep going with it and stay open, I’ll receive the lessons I need to evolve as an artist—and a person. So that someday, maybe as soon as today, a part of me might shine forth and reveal a world I never knew existed. ✶

1. I know that in various cultures and traditions, the sun is typically viewed as masculine while the moon is feminine, but for whatever reason, I have always seen the sun as feminine. In less esoteric terms, the sun is neither man nor woman nor any gender at all, but a burning fireball in space. However, because I am full of whimsy, I can’t help but see her as feminine, and in this instance as she relates to my own personal mythology, especially.