These images are all taken from three rolls of 16mm film I shot, often clumsily, on a Bolex camera during a cross country road trip in the summer of 1985. For many decades, the film sat untouched in small silver cans. By the time I had the footage scanned, I had no idea what movie I had been trying to make. I scrubbed through the digitized images on my computer, looking at individual frames like a detective, trying to piece together the intentions of the young filmmaker behind the camera.

In 2015, I started printing the images using the alternative photographic processes I had fallen in love with: cyanotype, platinum/palladium, gum dichromate. The slow, even tedious, nature of these processes suited my state of mind at the time. There were a lot of big changes happening in my life and in my work, and making films had begun to feel difficult, in all the wrong ways. 24 frames per second, the rate at which motion picture film moves through the camera as it records human activity, was dizzying. I needed to look at things one frame at a time.

I thought of the first prints I made, from screenshots (bad practice!), as tests. I had intended to go back to the original film negative, as one does, for higher quality images. But as I worked with the prints, I found that I liked the digital noise that came with the lower resolution. It felt consistent with the nature of the detective work and, frankly, a more truthful rendition of the fact that I was working under the conditions of lost intentions.

Eventually, over time and through the alchemy of photographic chemistry, I let go of the idea of distortion as problematic. There is no such thing: it is all merely transformation. I began to accept and embrace the layers of dust and time that were embedded in the images, the fuzzy memory and physical disintegration, the added and sometimes incorrect perspectives of age and hindsight. There was no retrieving the original; there no longer was an original. I was making these pictures at that particular moment because that particular moment was when they were finally demanding to be made. In other words, you can only make what you make when you make it. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: You can’t go home again: just keep going..