INTERVIEW // FINDING OUR WAY BY GETTING LOST
Into the Woods
Artist Robert Sparrow Jones on finding our way home in a fragile, frightening, beautiful world
by Launa Changnon
EXCERPT //
RSJ: Junior high. So, I wanted to make movies. That was my interest. I had an interest in storytelling, and I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it. I’m a visual person, and so, watching films—that was it for me. I was captivated.
My grandmother had a Super 8 film, like a Bolex Super 8, and I would borrow it and I would make movies. But film was so expensive back then. It was real expensive for a little spool that was only, like, three minutes long. It was fun.
When we had this opportunity for a darkroom, I was like, ‘Oh, this is really cool!’ And in the darkroom were boxes of Kodak film paper that were totally unused. And so I bought a camera and started taking pictures because I knew that I could develop them myself. And I learned how to do that through books and using this darkroom.
LC: You’re self-taught.
RSJ: They had an old, good old Omega and an old Bessler [camera] in there. And I just learned how to do it by trial and error. Is that crazy?
LC: That’s so crazy.
RSJ: This is the craziest thing: I was working as a short-order cook at a Hardee’s or Big Boy. And so I was, like, flipping burgers, making eggs. And every night, there was a policeman who would come in and sit at the bar and have coffee during his shift and talk to the waiters.
He saw we were using cameras—a friend of mine got into it, too. … He was like, ‘Can you use some film?’ and we’re like, ‘Yeah, sure!’
And so he came in and he had a gigantic container of T-Max 100, bulk. … Suddenly, we had a limitless amount of film. Just trial and error. And so we learned how to bulk load it and we took hundreds of pictures, developed it in the darkroom.
And that’s how I learned photography, just by trial and error, using this free film and free chemicals and free paper—until it ran out. //
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