Hit Play by Russell Barajas
The act and art of photography sometimes weighs upon us, doesn’t it? The responsibility we feel as documentarians, as the keepers and interpreters of stories, as the witnesses to history itself--it can feel chillingly Heavy. With a capital H.
That weight can sometimes be enough to prevent us from even picking up our cameras.
Luckily, that’s where play can come in to save the day, just like it did when we were kids. Play. With a capital P.
You can take an image, maybe one that has never quite worked for you, one that resisted your every effort. Would a little playtime help?
By play, I mean letting go of any preconceived plans for this image. Allow yourself to reinterpret, mess with, goose it. Can you change the orientation? Crop? Add color where there was none or subtract it where there was? Can you literally—or metaphorically—color outside the lines, scratch, bite, rend, fold, rethink? I ask myself these questions all the time, and I find that even pondering the possibilities is half the fun. Play can serve as a magic unsticking tool.
My particular photographic practice involves film and the darkroom, so I am physically engaged in the process, which helps me get out of my own head, so to speak.
Sometimes a particular image begs me to explore many different iterations—maybe it needs to be let out of its original confines (in my case a physical negative) and expanded upon. So I will play with ideas and techniques as I expose the image onto paper—I might shimmy it to blur, or over or under expose, or increase contrast, changing the overall mood. I might make a contact print to produce a negative image, print on old, fogged paper, solarize, or all of the above. Some images I choose to hand color—which is a whole other rabbit hole of playground-style enjoyment—to talk about another day.
And I always, always have music on while I play, part of me wondering whether my darkroom playlist (there’s that word play again) on any given day might have an influence on my results…
Giving ourselves permission to play can reinvigorate us and lighten our hearts just as surely as zipping down a water slide or building sandcastles at the beach. There’s something to be said for turning our work on its head and seeing if it stands on its own two feet. Literally or metaphorically, it doesn’t really matter. Just enjoy.