I’m going to start the entry off by saying that I love my job. I mean really I do love it, but the best feeling in the world when I close the door and I am in my own little world. It will sound corny but I make dinner every night, actual real life dinner, not TV dinner or takeout. Actual dinner. Pots and pans and salt and pepper.

I’ve taken to calling my time when I get home as “creativity time.” I’m not so prolific anymore with the blog posting, not because I’m getting lazy. Rather I want to weave some kind of creative narrative around the pictures before I post them and sometimes that takes a while to come up with. And I’ve revived shooting with film, so it just takes longer to get my film back.

Like millions, if not billions of other people, I come home, flip on Netflix and well, the service shoots some kind of programming at me. Recently it recommended a movie called “Shirkers” and I cannot get it out of my mind for so many different reasons, most of course photography related.

I was out a couple of days ago shooting with my little weird half frame up by the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and I returned in my mind to “Shirkers” and honestly this is one of the most remarkable movies I have ever seen and so different from anything else I have seen for a long time. So much to feast on visually, intellectually and mood wise.

The simplest way to explain the movie is its a documentary about three young women who were 18 in 1992 and made a film called “Shirkers.” I was 15 in 1992, so these people could have been classmates of mine. They are now around my age, the same or different as they were a lifetime ago. The plot of the movie was a road movie around Singapore, where the three young women lived at the time, where the main character is a killer. But the plot isn’t even really the center of things. For me as usual it’s the visual and color story. And there’s a detective story aspect to the thing, but we’ll get to that.

The documentary weaves the film footage with present day life. It’s the film footage that really caught my eye. It has this absolutely dreamy fuzzed out film look about it. And the color palette is absolutely amazing. The film has this warm glow about it. And the bright colors are incredibly bright. I can’t really describe the color story. I guess it’s full of just primary colors. It’s Singapore, so full of these lush scenes of vegetation. Seeing Singapore as well brought to mind Europe and Asia at the same time, modern and old. In the eyes of these filmmakers, I bet it’s just “boring old Singapore” where they grew up, but to me it’s this technicolor wonderland.

What I particularly loved about this movie is that it plays into what I really love about photography, filmmaking, chronicling. I see other photographers work now and some of strikes me as much too precious. A lot of people call themselves photographers now but the images they produce are so shined up and polished and perfect. A lot of these pictures I see now call to mind more computer screen savers than actual examples of how these people see and interpret the world. Watching this Shirkers movie, I really saw myself in these filmmakers, photographing and filming inside tunnels, at car washes, on empty highways, their favorite bakeries and mannequin shops. They shoot scenes in a supermarket, with its green fluorescent light.

When I was at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir a couple of days ago, I looked around at the people walking around the reservoir. With my little half frame, I started photographing them. I started photographing the people lying in the grass near the Reservoir. I shot a swimming pool near the Reservoir. I stood there for a while and thought maybe this world is really like Shirkers, just little corners of experiences. I also thought about photography, where it’s much more interesting to shoot things like that than it is to shoot these perfectly flawless scenes. To me, corners, sunsets, abandoned things and mundane things have always been much more interesting that massive vistas, landmarks and shallow depth of field flower or animal pictures. I always joke that I’m not the precious photographer. Half the time my camera is covered in ice cream or whatever I’m eating at the time. This really happened. I am not making it up. Many times this happened. A couple of days ago, I put my coffee commuter cup into my handbag with the aforementioned half frame, just to discover a bit later than the entire cup had spilled into the inside of the handbag and the half frame smells like espresso now. I just cleaned it off with an alcohol wipe and it was back in business.

Back to the aforementioned “Shirkers.” Me being the photography weirdo that I am is there busy watching for all the visual stuff, shamelessly stealing ideas for future photos. The story too in the film, which slowly unfolds, is engrossing on its own. The three young women, teenagers basically, make this film, really a labor of love and really all they have because it is 1992, film making equipment and reels upon reels of film are difficult, if not impossible to get for non professionals with no means. They make the film under the tutelage of a mysterious man named Georges Cardona.

Cardona cuts a really interesting figure in the movie. His origins were obscured. He seemed to tell a lot of tall tales. He seemed to have an interesting personal life. And in the end, he becomes the villain of the piece. Once the film is finished, the three women take off to different corners of the planet, leaving Georges with their film. He’s supposed to edit their film and show it to them as a finished product. Instead he disappears without a trace. Honestly I don’t know how these women dealt with that, because I would be pretty angry if a person did something like that to me.

Years later, they find out that Georges has died and his wife or companion has the film of their movie. There is no sound to this movie they soon realize. Georges has taken the voice track for “Shirkers.” The film delves interestingly into Cardona’s life, which seems to be filled with half truths, tall tales and things left unsaid.

I guess with this new inspiration floating around in my head, I looked at some of the film I got back recently from the Cayman Islands. We went on our annual sojourn down there. I was supposed to bring a favorite medium format TLR. Instead I brought my Canon AE-1. I brought a backup panoramic medium format camera. Yes I travel with that man cameras. No my neck does not get tired from all of those cameras. So I decided to shoot the roll loaded into the camera, just for some film fun and I dragged the camera all those miles, hey why not shoot something.

As I looked at these though, Shirkers did come to mind. They have this dreamy haze to them. They capture maybe some less beautiful parts of the island. But the pictures are a chronicle, not an art piece. Corners, memories, rather than ultra sharpened laminated looking images. Honest and imperfect in their very form.

The Cayman Films, I guess that’s the title if you like: