Small Town America on 35mm: Nostalgia, Film, and Finding Beauty in the Mundane

America in October....golden light, pumpkin stalls, thrift stores, and an eerie silence that lingers between seasons. My 35mm film photographs document the quiet charm of small-town America, where autumn's arrival is marked by fading neon signs, farm stands draped in cornstalks, and the ever present glow of a Spirit Halloween banner.

Growing up in America I didn't realise how much I missed it until this trip; visiting my sister and being able to capture the quietness of Florida during my favorite time of year was such a amazing experience.

Finding inspiration for these images wasn’t hard. From the second I stepped into these small-town scenes, nostalgia hit me like a wave; the warm autumn air, the pumpkin stalls with the most beautiful pumpkins you ever did see, and the silence of parking lots under a fading sky. I just wanted to capture exactly what my eye was drawn to.

Shooting all these images on 35mm film makes you take a second to think about what you want to photograph, this series was about the everyday in which I hadn't seen for over 15 years at that point. But, when it comes to digital it becomes so easy to just take a bunch of photographs but that's why I mainly shoot with film because I want to feel what I'm photographing. Over the years I've researched a LOT of different practitioners and it's opened my eyes to what I should be looking at and not always just taking a photograph of everything that's in front of me.

I shoot because I want to romanticize the everyday, to capture those in-between moments that hold so much meaning. Sometimes, it’s about stepping back and just letting the world unfold in front of you and really that's what I love most to photograph.

William Eggleston was one of the main inspirations for these images; the way in which he documented America was completely different from what anyone had seen before - it was his perception and that was his art. Finding beauty in the mundane was really what my own series of images works on; I wanted to find the beauty of the everyday that not all of us notice. I find beauty in the everyday life which can be blind to others - this is something that Eggleston would pride his work on and being able to understand his vision opens my eyes to looking at the world differently.

His use of colours are again something that I wanted to tune into for this series - Eggleston would use Kodak's dye transfer printing process so that he would have full control over the images. As for myself, I decided to scan these images in using my flatbed scanner - once they were scanned I was able to have full control over the images. Now, because I was using Kodak Gold 200 it wasn't so bad when it came to the saturated colours but I enhanced them the smallest bit to create the images that felt fully true to me. Side note: I personally don't think there is anything wrong with editing film photos (they aren't always going to come out the way you want them (I suppose there is beauty in that too) but I feel when you have a vision for your images it's okay to create what you want from them and if that's through a small bit of editing then that's totally okay. 💅)