My Beautiful Laundrette

In my last post, I wrote about returning to shooting on film and putting a roll of Kodak C41 black and white film through my MTL3.

When I got the case out I found that there was a roll of Boots colour film in there.  It was a roll of 400 negative film that had expired ten years ago.  

Yes, for those that don’t know, film has a best before date.

Not only that but the film had been kept in my case
in the attic therefore it had been subject to massive fluctuations in temperature.  So, it was difficult to determine what it would be like once it was shot.

I didn’t want to use this film for random images.  As I have posted frequently, I prefer to work in a series of images rather than one or two.  I like projects and this is what I wanted to do with this film.  I wanted to shoot the entire film on one series of images.  Next was the subject.

The subject had to be something that would work
over around 20 images.  The roll of film was actually 36 but being film rusty, the condition of the film and the chances that I would mess up some technicality I assumed I would have around 20 usable images if I was lucky.

The answer came to be by accident.  I drove past a laundrette one day and it struck me that it had the same appearance as it probably did when it first opened.  OK, it may be a little worse for wear around the edges, but the signs and ‘art’ (losing the term loosely) looked pretty much like I think they would have done in the 1970’s and early 80’s.  I thought about this carefully and I realised that every laundrette that I had been in had a same or similar appearance.  I also thought that as washing machines have become more affordable that laundrettes would be a thing of the past, a dinosaur waiting to become extinct.  I had an inkling that this subject would suit film and in particular would suit this roll of film that when process could result in weird colours and artefacts due to the age.  So off I went.

I began with laundrettes that I knew still existed and then I began to find more and more of them.  In fact, it has actually shattered my illusion.  The laundrette busy is still thriving and while the one’s I visited are a relic of the past there are new, clean, modern laundrettes opening up.

The film was processed by a lab in C41 chemistry and I have scanned the negatives.  I have to admit that my neg scanner isn’t very good and there is deterioration in the sharpness of the image, noise and colour isn’t quite right but you know what?  That doesn’t matter too much.  I think it suits the subject perfectly.

The final set of images has been posted on my Flickr stream or you can see them on the slideshow below.

I quite enjoyed doing this.  It was different and challenging.  Removing the comfort of digital has been both worrying and exciting.  I think there is scope for a bigger project here.  Watch this space!