Devotion
Devotion began in the act of seeing—wandering with my camera, attuned to light. This connection continued throughout the entire process of making—a shared intimacy between my surroundings, film, darkroom, print, and hand. Process as relationship: the dialogue that unfolds when tender, obsessive attention meets material. Through this exchange, the ephemeral beauty of the moment is not captured, but received—translated through touch, time, and presence into photographs.
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I still remember the first time I stepped onto the Photography floor and realized what I had access to—enlargers, chemicals, scanners, printers. An entire world built for creation. I felt so deeply privileged, like I had been handed the keys to something sacred. I could stay all day. All night.
The darkroom was bathed in soft amber light—sensual, like candlelight. Water was always running somewhere, a constant trickle underneath everything, like a heartbeat. I loved that sound. It made the room feel alive.
The enlarger cast this beautiful green-blue light when exposing the paper—like the color of a mirror’s edge catching sun.
I would watch myself reflected in the developer tray as the photo began to appear, my face rippling in the chemical bath as a photograph slowly surfaced. It felt like looking into another world—or maybe watching one be born. Time felt infinite in those moments, even as the clock hanging from the ceiling marked every passing second. I was focused on the timing, yet in a flow my body understood more than my mind.
The first time I developed film, freshman year, I felt a real intensity. Pitch black. No safelight. Just my hands, the roll of film, a canister opener, the spiral reels and development tank. I had spent days shooting all over NYC. I remember thinking, How on earth am I supposed to do this without seeing anything? One wrong movement and the roll could be blank. I dropped the film trying to guide it onto the spiral reel—flustered, a little clammy, but completely determined to learn. With time it became second nature, though the possibility of a blank roll was always there.
Once the film was on the spiral reels and in the development tank, it was time to shake. I’d put my headphones on, melt into music, and move with the rhythm, trusting the process. Mixing the chemicals myself made me feel like a scientist. Creation was happening in my hands. This wasn’t conceptual. It was physical. Chemical. Real.
The rolls came out of the development tanks and went into the dryer. Twenty minutes later, I’d stand there marveling at the negatives—tiny worlds suspended in strips of film. I’d cut them carefully in the Print room, using the light boards and magnifiers to study every frame. Sliding them into negative sleeves for preservation was a form of care.
Then came the decisions. Contact sheets. What wanted more time under the enlarger, what wanted to be printed in the darkroom or digitally, and which sizes would I choose. Later, scanning became its own obsession. Long, sleepless nights before graduation, trying to preserve as much as possible before losing access to the equipment. The Hasselblad scanners were incredible—they allowed me to discover crops within crops, worlds inside worlds, details I hadn’t even noticed when shooting.
Digital printing on the large Epson printers felt like another miracle. Canvas prints, watching the photos scale up into something tactile. I never got around to printing on silk—that’s still on my list, someday.
The Photography floor was alive, a sanctuary in the city, where I worked with my hands, learned patience, precision, and fell in love with process. Devotion comes from the hours, the repetition, the trust, the surrender to light, water, chemistry, and time.
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Shot on Pentax K1000, 35mm film developed and scanned by hand.