Looking Back on a Life's Work
15 Years of The RangeFinder Diaries.
I’ve been posting a new film photo every day, for 15 years.
The RangeFinder Diaries is a project that has quietly been running in the background of my entire career as a photographer. It’s been a long road of taking chances, learning on my own, defining my style, developing my passion, and most importantly separating personal from professional work. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I’d still be a photographer if I didn’t start this project 15 years ago.
Let’s jump back to November 2009. I’m two months into photography school and living in Western Massachusetts. I was attending the now-defunct Hallmark Institute of Photography and the 5D MkII had just come out. My class was the first they didn’t start the year teaching film photography. They just gave everyone a 5D and said “Shoot away!” The school was very modern and commercially focused, so instead of learning things like art history; we were learning to shoot table top glassware, reflective metal, and taking business classes on tax write-offs. The latter, honestly is probably the most important information I learned.
When me and my photo friends would go into Boston, or take the bus down to NYC, or even walking around Amherst MA, they’d bring their DSLR. I’d reluctantly lug mine around with me too because it felt like if I was a photographer, I should carry my camera with me everywhere. It would rarely leave my bag and I’d just be left with back pain. Even today, my digital camera kit doesn’t leave the house unless I’m getting paid, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
I was only two months into school and felt myself asking if it was actually my passion. We were learning the basics of photography that wasn’t particularly scratching my itch to be creative and I could feel my enthusiasm waning. I was disappointed that we weren’t learning to shoot film, which was something I was really looking forward to after speaking to photographers who attended the school in the years before me. I decided to give myself a challenge.
I found myself a cheap Canonet QL-17 rangefinder with dried out light seals, and a blotchy yellow focus patch you had to really squint at to check focus. It had a serial number engraved deep into the baseplate, most likely from some other school’s forgotten EQ cabinet. It was small and light enough to carry with me all the time, and not intrusive the way a DSLR can be. I would post a new photo to a Tumblr page every day, meaning I would need to shoot at least one roll of film a month. Not an impossible feat, but some months I had to push myself to go somewhere interesting to finish the roll so I wouldn’t lapse on my challenge.
My Canonet came everywhere with me snapping pics at parties, of friends, out the window on long drives, and late nights in the city. The camera had so much light leak that no two rolls looked the same and I felt like that was a feature more than a bug back then. It was like a someone released a pressure valve. My assignment work for school eventually included more creativity but shooting film became a separation of my commercial and my personal work.
I wasn’t sure what would happen to The RangeFinder Diaries after I graduated school, but I still had photos in the archive to post and there were moments post-college where I still needed that push to go out and create new work. I decided to let it ride. Three, five, nine years rolled on by, still posting daily. Touring with bands, taking road trips, and eventually settling in Jersey City, I was constantly out doing new things and my film archive was working at a surplus. With the ten year anniversary looming, I again asked myself if the project was still useful to me since I seemingly no longer needed a push to shoot more. Thinking maybe I’d throw a ten year retrospective gallery show and sunset the project. The big anniversary came and went and ultimately I decided to keep it going and I’m really grateful I did.
Even within the last year, I found the photo queue getting thin. I was overwhelmed with commercial work and wasn’t out shooting for fun so I pushed myself like the old days to take a beat to explore parts of the city I hadn’t been and finish off a roll of film that’d been in my Contax for a over a month. Sometimes I still need that push to remind myself what photography means to me. That separation I still credit to the success of my career to this day. It allows me to keep loving photography even when I’m burnt out in other aspects of photo life.
15 years and almost 5,500 photos, The RangeFinder Diaries is very much a macro project; greater than the sum of it’s parts. Having a visual diary spanning 15 years has become such an incredible utility. A fun thing to do is use the Archive feature and choose a random year and month and see what was going on at that time in my life. Seeing my film scanning skills improve (thank god I learned how to color correct.) My camera collection upgrading from the Canonet, to a Leica M6, to my beloved Contax and Yashica.
I’ve always taken the roll of archivist and pride in saving these memories when things are so easily lost in this world. I am terrified that I’ll wake up one day and Tumblr will be gone, but maybe that’ll be the natural end of the project.
Until then, The RangeFinder Diaries pushes onward, every day.