Just another middle-aged trans woman in Ottawa (🇨🇦) who is enjoying life with her partner, Kathleen. I’m a bit of a trans stereotype: femme, purple hair, public servant, vegan, and into making her photos on film!

After about 20 years making photos digitally (with small cameras or phones), I decided in early 2020 that it just made sense for me to make photos on film again since I was always editing them to “look like” film anyway.

I always knew that I wanted to develop my own film, so after a few years using the services of some very nice labs, in Fall 2024 I decided that it was time to develop my own!

I now process and scan all of my own black-and-white, C-41, and E-6 film. I plan to add ECN-2 this Spring too!

“I have no statement at this time”

Since I don’t see myself as any sort of artist doing art (just a girl with some cameras she likes using), I’ve never really felt the need to draft any sort of statement about what I’m hoping to accomplish making all of these photos.

Except, that has only ever been a half-truth.

It’s in the Motion. It’s in the Environment.

Unlike many people who make and share photos (including actual photographers), when I make photos, I don’t really envision making any single specific excellent photo that stands out on its own and speaks some universal human truth.

Instead, I’m mostly making photos of what I’m seeing while out and about. If something catches my eye and just sort of looks neat or interesting to me, I will make a photo that mimics what I think I’m seeing. In that sense, it’s about recording my engagement with space.

Almost always cities and towns too. Because, in spite of being born and raised in a fairly remote resource town, I’m a city girl at heart and am endlessly fascinated by them.

It’s a Set.

This is why I almost never share single photos. They aren’t made so that they can stand on their own and I don’t try to share them that way either.

I will normally share them as a set of six or twelve here, and on social media, they usually come in fours.

Who hurt influenced you?

Of course, none of us make anything ex nihilo!

I just don’t have a shelf of photo books with the works of well-regarded photographers, am not familiar with most of their work, and have never tried to recreate or replicate it. Instead, I have two main sources of influence:

Cinematographers

I don’t think I could name any of them, unfortunately, but I have so many vague flashes from films and television over the years and I believe that this is where I get my sense of motion.

To get a little more specific, I know that I picture and have drawn influence from Film Noir of the 1940s and 1950s, from NFB films of the 1960s (i.e. Nobody Waved Good-Bye (1964)), and mountains of televised cancon from the 1970s and 1980s.

Even more specifically, I know that I was more influenced by the b-roll they included to establish context and setting, than I was by the main footage.

People with Cameras in Cities

They might be photographers, or maybe not. One of the most significant ignition sources for my imaginary is archival photos of cities.

They might have been made by unnamed officials working for departments of housing or public works; or they might be hobbyists whose collections were deposited at an archive; or they might have been named photographers whose earlier workaday commercial or day-to-day news beat work I found really interesting.

All of these sources have given me a sort of window into the environment one might expect existing in a city or town at a given time. This sort of fuel for my imagination really inspired me in my previous life writing histories, and it certainly does today while making photos.

What I hope to do.

I would love nothing more than for my photos to some day be as inspirational to someone else as I have been inspired by others. I hope that, if someone were to look at my collection, that they would get a sense of what I have seen, what the cities I’m in felt like at the time, and for their own imaginations to be sparked.

I would also like to be able leave some traces of trans life and experience in the future. We’re always just a little on the knife’s edge of perceptibility in society and, given the dark clouds we’re entering, it’s quite possible that we’re back on a path to having to be rediscovered once again.

It’s quite fortunate that, thanks to the creativity of trans people who have come before us, we can know at least a little bit about their lives and experiences.

For both of these purposes, I would really like to plan to deposit my negatives to an archive in the future. They’re even already well-catalogued and indexed (both digitally and on typewritten sheets in their binders)!

Should an archive agree to store them, it would please me so much if someone in the future would find my photos useful and inspiring for their own work – be it photographic, written, or otherwise!