Love List : March

the beautiful ordinary | enchanted gold | crossing the genre divide

There was a time when I collected my memories in paper packets — envelopes of photographic prints with a slim pocket in the front for negatives, the photographs’ strange inverted shadows. To remember — to relive — a trip or a summer, I would spread the photographs out across the table or over my bedroom floor. Some were moments crisply captured, others blurry, oddly framed, blown out, or bisected by a light-torn fade at the end of the film. These were the pictures I loved most — they still are — imperfect imprints of memory and light. Shooting on film was always an act of uncanny magic — the distillation of a feeling, time made tangible. Now, when I want to look backwards, I scroll through my phone camera roll, and image after image dances across my screen — colours clear and focus sharp — an unintentional moodboard of my life.

March, my camera roll tells me, was a grey month this year — slate skies and raindrops, woolly hats and warm coats. There was late snow, swirling prettily down, but all we really wanted by then was to feel the breath of spring. This month, as so often lately, water has carried me through — I’ve swum every weekend, in quarry, lake and sea. The water at this time of the year is colder than ever — brutal in its chill — but the certainty of its iron embrace is oddly soothing to me. Sometimes I feel blurred around the edges, tired and unsure, a fading, out of focus version of myself. But in the water, I find sharp clarity and when I step out, pink-skinned, the colours of the world around me seem more vivid. Over the last week, the temperature has begun (in the tiniest of increments) to creep upwards again. Spring — the glowing green beginning of it — is here. I dig in the back of my drawer for an old roll of 35mm film, and thread it carefully into my Canon AE-1. The light is coming back, I can feel it.

Here’s what I’ve been reading & loving this month: