Film as Object

When I was a student learning photography, I spent many hours handling and processing film. A certain portion of the film processing routine is an experience of emptiness where not much appears to be happening. In this dark and quiet interlude I began to ask questions about this material that I was spooling, dipping in chemicals, washing and drying. I began to see film as something more than just a carrier of images, but itself as an object. Generally we’ve come to accept the nature of film as defined by the camera—a receiver and carrier of the image—yet film exists independent of these impressions. There is something more.

In its basic physical structure, 35mm film consists of a light sensitive emulsion covering a long strip of clear plastic. The film is capable of receiving any iteration of visible light. The camera’s shutter and film advancement mechanism divide the film surface into frames of exposed and unexposed emulsion, comprising the images and the intervals between them. As the film is delimited into a series of discrete rectangles containing specific light impressions, the nature of the film-object is displaced. In this sense the camera functions as a reductive instrument. The continuum of the film-object is defeated by division and compartmentalization. Metaphorically, this mechanically generated attribute of the 35mm camera mimics the reductive functions of our sensory perception and cognitive memory processes that are so necessary for effective discernment and day-to-day functioning. To take in all that we perceive would clearly be too much for us. In receiving the world through our senses, we “frame”; and in order to integrate our perceptions, we, too, edit. 


I was intrigued by these thoughts and ideas and wanted to make photographs that would embody an awareness of film as an object unto itself. I realized that by defeating the framing process of the 35mm camera the image could assume the elongated physical form of the film, both highlighting and countering the camera’s mediating role in reductive interpretation. The method involves making images that have no or minimal light exposure at the edges of the frame. The effect is further accentuated by exposing the roll of film more than once and by off-setting the film advancement mechanism. Freed from the camera’s mechanical delineation, the exposed strip of film appears as a continuous flow of interfusing impressions. Markers of orientation and points of view are indeterminate as images emerge from darkness to overlap and blend, coexist and subside. Our experiences of time and space, normally conjoined, separate and diverge as image events spill into and crowd one another, occupying the same visual space but of a separate, distinct time.

I was also looking for a way to work with these ideas without simply making explicit illustrations, objects, or direct references. I wanted to make images that interpenetrate and commingle the awareness of the objective realities of film and camera with the traditional intent of the photograph as representative. Such a relationship might establish a dialogue between the image and the viewer centered on issues of resolution, issues that arise with the blending of distinct and separate time/space events into visual coexistence. I sought to offer an alternative to accepted notions concerning a photograph as depicting a moment in time, while maintaining as fluid an understanding of what photography represents. In my efforts to create images that deny, postpone, or redefine what leads to cognitive resolution, there is an appreciation that ambiguity prolongs interest by encouraging the processes of discovery and inquiry, interactions that are central to an experience of enjoyment. It became apparent that I needed to find an event well suited to this photographic intent.

The Grand Olympic Auditorium in southern downtown Los Angeles has a long and storied history as a sports, music, and event venue. It’s resonant with the energy of people and activities at the very edge of the culture. From boxing matches to professional wrestling to roller derby, to punk and rap, and to rave events of up to 10,000 people (complete with riots), the Olympic has been a witness to our impulse to break free of societal norms.

One Thursday night in late 1979, my friend, James, and I went downtown to the Olympic Auditorium to watch boxing and make photographs. As to be expected, there were a lot of things going on in and around the auditorium, making it a rich source of imagery. Outside it was raining. Inside the atmosphere was close and expectant. Although I enjoyed the rough atmosphere of the Olympic, watching people hit each other is not something that particularly interests me. Boxing as a form, however, was beautifully suited to my interest in conjoining the objective qualities of 35mm film and camera with a time-based narrative. The light inside and out was spotty and localized, allowing me to compose without illuminating the edges of the image frame. Because boxing unfolds in dramatic sequential action, it already possesses a basic narrative structure—a clear beginning, middle, and end—easily lending itself to the elongated image form intrinsic to the structure of 35mm film.

Before the fight James ate a hot dog and shared a conversation with a stranger. In the image they lean against a counter of mustard dispensers, napkins, and pay-phones. Above their heads hang the framed images of the heroes of this house. Between them are framed silhouettes of men passing in and out of a bathroom door. There is the simultaneity of intake and out-flow, connection and anonymity, the exceptional and the mundane. Within the image time both progresses and remains held by repetition. The photographic coexistence of these strangely affiliated events provides a synergy of associations and narratives that are varied and ambiguous.

In the the ring the boxers reach for each other across the darkness, their arms, backs, and shoulders seeking contact and advantage. Their faces are hidden in shadow, anonymous even to themselves.

It is their small world, where awareness is distilled into fleeting moments of attack and defense, the fighters exist beside themselves, reiterated in their solitude. Above and shining between them, is the light of their own distant inverted arena. It’s a strange lamp of their very setting, spotlit and pressed by the crowd’s desire for a vicarious experience of violence. The image connects what’s near with what’s far and what’s happening to what has already occurred. Events and gestures that are antecedent and ensuing, exist simultaneously to both contextualize and complicate the moment.

In these images life cannot be contained by the camera or subdued into a single frame. Passionate figures emerge from a deep night background like memories from our collective unconscious, impacting the viewer with multiple impressions, points of reference, and perspectives. Each image is a tableau unfolding a small event with two or three or six gestured moments interlocked and overlaid with the rhythms of people and places, heads and bodies, of violent striving and of the mundanity of the need to triumph, to eat, to see, and escape into the anonymity of the night.

In each of the images there exists more than one of any similar thing. These many things are bound by a self-referencing complexity that confounds the reductive mechanics of the camera to render events in an orderly and dependable sequence. Narrative is mutable with multiple pathways present and available for associative exploration. The declaration of meaning is somewhat ambiguous as the time and place of events is inconclusive by nature of the images being so inclusive of other related and unrelated time/place image fragments. The photographs present occurrences as outside of time yet in a manner that references time as of the continuum of flow and stops, inverted and reverted, like fighting, like us, under the spell of life at the edge.

It was not my intention to document boxing or what happened that night at the Olympic. Nor was the intent of this project to create images generated by an interesting photographic technique. This work grew out of my curiosity concerning a question centered on the contemplation of “what is”—what is film? With these images I am disassembling our acceptance of the camera’s interpretive potential as limited to a series of distinct image frames while emphasizing the nature of 35mm film as an object of light-receptive material.

There are different ways to highlight these ideas. Displaying an exposed and uncut piece of roll film would be one unambiguous statement. Creating one long continuous print of an entire roll of continuously exposed film would be another. Yet, for me, the challenge became how I might bring forth this experience of film and camera and then re-embed that back into an image to be rediscovered by the viewer. The images become encoded symbols commenting on the nature of the film-object and an inquiry into what we have overlooked concerning photographic tools and materials. In this sense the images function as a question asked rather than as an answer given.