Engraved in Fire

Engraved in Fire is a photography gallery created for the Spring 2023 issue of UNH’s Main Street Magazine, published in May 2023. The following photos were published with the paragraphs below:

There’s a beauty in degraded media that we seem to have a fascination with. A distorted, worn-out VHS tape — flipping through the faded, curled pages of an old book — the warm hiss of an old vinyl record. The more that technology develops into the realms of perfection, the more we retreat to the imperfect world of the past. Is it nostalgia? Melancholy? Comfort? Is it an escape from the increasing burdens of the present day? Decay and age robs from us our most precious moments, so why do we revel in destruction as an aesthetic?

This series of photos, taken between January and March of 2023, is an homage to this destruction. The photos were shot on 35mm, 120, and Polaroid film cameras, and then the developed film was then purposely destroyed via burning, scratching, cutting, or submerging in water/acids. The destroyed negatives/prints were then re-scanned, cropped, and color-corrected. 

I hope that with this gallery, the flawed, fragmented lives that we all live can be represented as joy through celluloid. Our memories, just like film, may be fleeting. Film can be burnt. Even torn into shreds. But that doesn’t negate the stories that we can tell with these memories. Maybe we can find joy in loss. Maybe we can find out a little bit about ourselves through sacrifice. Maybe the worn, fading world that we live in is a sign that we’ll all turn out just fine.

-n.j.