I don’t like to feel restricted taking photos. I don’t like to carry heavy tripods, lenses, and puffy camera bags. My Lomo Lubitel TLR is a fragile plastic being that understands my needs. It fits comfortably in my cupped hands and sits where I place it on tree stumps and roots. My first time using this camera, when I thought I must have finished the whole roll, I checked the counter and realized I had never advanced the film. When I caught this mistake and finished the roll, the first layered image was the most intriguing. After this accident, I began intentionally advancing halfway to overlap frames. I mainly make these photos in forests and in sets of three images, each halfway seeping into the next. 

It feels like I am choreographing more than I am constructing an image. My brain switches to a different way of observing: instead of taking photos when I first feel the spark to capture them, I try to memorize each moment that intrigues me. I gather their afterimages behind my eyes as I continue moving through the forest. I repeat the afterimages in my head in different combinations, until a set of three clicks into place. Then, I circle back to collect the images in my camera. 

I generally plan for one or two moments of transformation in each image: I hope that my dark shirt transforms into the forest floor, I hope the portal in the hole of a tree stump becomes a door to somewhere else, I hope I climb out of the void of the sky with bark under my fingernails. Often, the photos align in ways I cannot take credit for. One of my favorite moments in the process is the gift of taking my film out of the fixer and holding the negatives up to the light.

I have been calling this technique making “tributaries”. A tributary is a smaller stream that feeds into a larger body of water, or a vein in the body. It also means an offering or a tribute. These sprawling images are long and vertical. They flow like a river, they are slippery, they bleed into each other, they add up to something larger than themselves.