I found myself in a creative rut recently and decided to lean into it. These periods of time used to cause intense panic within me. I’d wonder if I’d lost my ability to photograph the world around me or if I ever even had it. I’d worry the creative spark would not return. I’d feel angst and double down on whatever project I was working on. I’d force it; I’d try to anyway. And then I learned to let go and embrace the uncertainty.
In the midst of feeling uncreative, I noticed I couldn’t stop looking at clouds and wondering about film soup. Film soup is a type of experimental film photography I learned from my good friend and mentor, Amy Elizabeth at The Art Lab and It’s Amy Liz. It involves shooting a roll of 35mm film and then submerging it in a recipe of your choosing. I shot one roll of Kodak 400 and boiled it in a mixture of Grape KoolAid and lemon juice. For the second roll, I shot Kodak 200 and boiled it in a mixture of Black Cherry KoolAid, lemon juice, and Dawn dish soap. I allowed both rolls to dry on my windowsill for two weeks before sending it off to Amy’s Film Lab 135 to be developed.
When I received the scans a couple weeks later, I was surprised to see that the clouds did not come through quite as I expected. They were subtle and almost translucent in most of the images. As I scanned through the gallery, I felt it….that creative spark had returned. Instead of giant, fluffy clouds on the screen before me, there was bold, vibrant, vivid color with the most interesting cracks. Film magic.
Boiling the roll had created cracks in the film. I had zero control over it; could never have planned it. It was the alchemy of the film soup. The results are mesmerizing and wild!
As I scrolled the gallery of images, I found myself thinking of Anthem by Leonard Cohen.
The birds they sang
Anthem by Leonard Cohen
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
In the surrender of the angst, I found beauty. I found my creative spark again in the cracks, in color, and in film magic. ~ Laura
An important note about developing film soup:
Please take good care to ONLY send souped film to a lab that specializes in developing it and NOT to your regular film lab where it might cause damage to equipment and/or other people’s film batch.