Community - "Roommates"
An Introduction:
I met Dane and Sebastian at the tail-end of spring my sophomore year of college. I quickly realized once you meet one of them, it's inevitable you'll meet the other within days (or hours). Barely a day goes by when I don't think about how differently my life would've gone had I not met the both of them, and had we all decided not to become friends.
I've been documenting our times together since summer of 2019 through film photography to capture memories rather than compositions. I've never been witness to such a beautiful, non-judgmental friendship that's grown so incredibly deep through the years, and a part of me feels so lucky to be able to photograph their growth as people and as brothers.
As any self-respecting 20-something does, I've also recorded our antics together through iPhone video, and I decided to stitch together a story of their own choosing. Their only prompt was "Tell me a story about the other". Without knowing what the other said, they both somehow decided to talk about the day they met.
Process:
I decided to divide the video into three separate compositions because I wanted to represent the three of us (me behind the camera, the person talking, and then the person being talked about) without revealing too much of our faces or external identity.
I scoured through my Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and iPhone camera roll for any and all videos I'd taken of Seb and Dane since spring of 2019, which I then downloaded to my Mac and started reviewing footage. Everything was converted to black and white to reduce the stimuli from interfering with the oral story.
Revisions + Thoughts
After my initial, 45 second rough draft to illustrate my concept and format, I received feedback to try and think of how this video could exist in a physical space. Fortunately, my roommate had a projector, and I played around with projecting the video on my bedroom walls. A clean corner of my room felt appropriate, cozy and tactile.
Final + Continuation
So much of this concept hinged on the idea of memory and recollection, and the addition of black, empty compositions represented the difficulty to recall events as the years go on. In interviewing both Dane and Seb, they both struggled to recall much of what'd happened to them before 2019- whether due to depression or the trauma of living through a monotonous 2020, they were unsure. It always felt necessary to let individual clips breath and let the viewer have a moment of stillness between cuts.
I'd love to continue this project between more people and make a chain of memories through friendships and archived iPhone footage, that could potentially go on indefinitely.
