Perfect Chemistry: a valentine’s day photography experience from Eastern Standard Photo
in collaboration with Laurie Trok/Emma Honcharski and Rust + Moss
You’re invited to the ESP studio on February 10th for a celebration of LOVE! Grab your bestie, your partner, or your mom! We embrace it all. Create sweet memories of your loved one on film and watch your photos come to life during the development process. Get inspired by an array of prompts, edible sculptural elements, and flowers. This event will offer guidance in making photographs of your loved one, and then we’ll chemically develop your film on site. Participants have the option of bringing their own camera or borrowing one. Film is provided.
Kelsey—
If I were a sixth grader writing valentines to my classmates on Snoopy styled, fold-over cardstock, I would write ‘love ya’, omitting the I, and that would be True and that would also be Vulnerable. I remember being young and feeling like I invented the concept of loving your friends (“your girlfriends”, in my mom’s voice). I confessed to loving my longest friend Katie in a tent at Girl Scout camp in third grade and later cried about it to my mom, thinking I was gay.
I doubled down on that supercharged platonic love the older I got and the clearer it became that my female friendships were the bedrock of myself, where I felt the safest and the most seen. I can recognize my borders most when they’re defined by my girlfriends, by you. When I arrive to your home for the week and you’ve already decided in your heart what clothes you’ll be letting me leave with and you’ve curated the snacks I like to eat and have a week of backtobacktoback activities—including this film photography workshop, love—planned out and written, I’m positive, in a notebook squirreled away somewhere.
What I can see from the ten year distance of our friendship is how you rewired the protocol of owning up to the profound love of female friendship. I’m thinking of us screaming at the bruised purple of the Grand Canyon and the time you came to the McDonald's bathroom stall I was quivering behind, sick with food poisoning. What I used to think was owning was actually removing myself altogether. The “I” who loves you was inferred, but absent.
Something you do that used to piss me off that I’ve come to really admire is how you completely exclude roadsigns from your speech so listeners have no choice but to either keep up or get left behind. It’s Lisafromwork upon first mention and then, similar to AP Style, on second mention henceforth, she’s just Lisa. You introduce me to a revolving door of people this week, to your realtor, your colleagues, to the employees at Bar Marco, as Jenna. Or MybestfriendJenna.
When people ask us how we meet we pause and look at each other. You tell them, I’m saying without saying, not wanting to do the whole thing. It’s a good story, but not one that can easily fit into a sentence.
The simplified version is that we met in college, but that omits the theatrical storyline of meeting in Florence, Italy, after having been in the same weeklong writing program at George Washington University years before. That erases the circumstances that are easy to call fate in retrospect: you were visiting my closest friend, who got sick, so we spent your weekend(?) together taking film photos, drinking in bars and trying on secondhand clothing at Mercato delle Cascine. That was 2013. You invited me to visit you in Scotland that same year and I did, and that was it. A long term distance relationship ensued. I just counted the ten years we’ve been friends to my hairdresser.
I’ve fallen in love many times in my life. A secret: it’s almost always more potent with female friends. Something about its unrestrained quality.
I have a running list of the women I’ve fallen in love with in the notes app on my phone, and you are on it. I remember the bubbling excitement of our star crossed paths. Both from New Jersey, both living in Europe, both writers and film photographers and post card aficionados and—guess what—women. I remember in the early years of our long term, long distance relationship, other friends would notice the presence you demanded in my life. You wrote me postcards on a regular basis, texted a stream of consciousness, mailed me jeans on my birthday.
We know from therapy talk that in relationships there's always a pursuer and a distancer. I always felt more comfortable identifying as the later, or as the former with constraints. Is it just growing up that things feel different now? We send each other lyrics back and forth. Taylor Swift’s invisible string. “Isn't it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?” Lorde’s A Writer in The Dark: “I love you til you call the cops on me.” Once, over the pandemic, we were stopped behind that Kia with the vanity plate that read STLL CRZY, which sent us into manic laughter. That’s us, you said.
I notice when I talk about our relationship, I really quickly center on the ways in which it mimics the binding qualities present in a marriage. We picked out your wedding band just the two of us at Williamsburg’s CatBird. I’m on your father-in-law's phone plan. We wear thin tinsel lines of fused gold, invisible string, on our wrists, tying ourselves to one another in a way not dissimilar from a wedding band.
I’m a 30-year-old writing you a Google Doc Valentine on your green velvet couch and I! love! You! Let’s eat Leona’s now.
Has anyone shot film recently? The facilitator, Kelly polls the collection of silent stares. Jenna and I both raise our hands. Pair by pair, we approach Kelly to receive our rental camera and load our film. I stride past the patient strangers and interrupt — Kelly, could we just grab our rental camera? We can load it ourselves. She is warm, passing me a 35mm manual camera with a green label affixed to the back that reads JASPER. Aw Jasper, I love him, we love him! Quick, we gotta go outside before we miss the light. The light! Photography is about light and we are losing it. Jenna and I load Jasper, close the back, click the shutter.
Outside. Literal fresh air. Alone again. We pose each other against the textured exteriors of Wilkinsburg. I hold a flower with a sheer green ribbon tied to the stem, a flower I don’t know the name of but feel like I should. It’s so much easier to write about the photography, about the composition and the inside jokes we share to elicit a reaction at the click of the shutter. But Valentine’s Day is about love, isn’t it? Love for who? And when?
*
How do you know each other? I hate this question because I understand the person who asks it hopes for some concise answer. That they likely don’t care how I booked a flight to Florence before finals of my sophomore year in university. That they had some expectation or rubric in their head before my answer that fit within their reductive idea of friendship. That it’s not really up to me to prove a love like ours.
I remember waking up in Melina’s apartment, the one with the view of the Duomo through my window. I remember an earnest desire to be around the art I was studying, in search of some cultural edification that never came. I remember reading for two hours in bed before Melina stirred, and then rushing to get ready and run out to buy tickets for the Fiorentina match later in the week. I remember the gathering of Americans, the long vowels of the east coast I’d not heard for months - the study abroad students of Melina’s cohort, outside the stadium box office. I remember the gum in the crevice of the cobbled street but I don’t remember my shoes even though I was staring at them. I remember the shame of recognition - that I know this girl who has just wrapped herself around Melina, and I don’t want her to live with the burden of remembering me. It was only two years ago when we met, but it felt like a lifetime, that impassable gap between high school and college. We never really spoke, not in my memory, in the two-week summer travel writing program where we studied together. I remember she remembered me, I remember my surprise at her warmth and excitement at our unexpected and unplanned reunion.
Romantic love has a language to determine the closeness of a relationship for those on the outside: we’re seeing each other, he’s my boyfriend, we’re married. Friendship? The language is stale, flat: she’s my friend. She’s my best friend. Best? According to what? For who? When?
In the past two years especially, I’ve become more interested in the concept of friendship. I can easily recognize the ways I’ve lived for my friendships, how my friendships are inextricable from how I think of myself, that I literally would not be able to see myself outside of how my friends portray me in our relationships. Though I do not cry often (I’ve been compared to Cameron Diaz in The Holiday), my friendships make me weep. The love overwhelms me. You bolster me, you inspire me, you challenge me when I’m being lazy, you remember the best versions of me.
Jenna read at my wedding. She read her own writing, an essay she wrote about me and Andrew and about (you guessed it) friendship through the lens of a marriage. In her birthday card for me this year, (the front reads Happy Birthday You Old Slut), she writes that someone remarked to her that when you have a friendship like ours, it sets the bar even higher for a romantic partnership. True, I think. I’ve never expected a romantic partner to out-perform any of my friendships, in some sick stadium where we pit our relationships against each other. There is this wider perception I’ve observed that romantic partnership is some gold standard, that friendships are nice but not celebrated in the same arenas, or with the same enthusiasm that we bring to weddings.
My friendship with Jenna offers a crystal clarity with which to look at myself. She is smart and generous, she will always listen and she won’t take a side because she sees the world as I see it - as an imperfect world without any moral right or wrong, a world with nuance and with complexity. We are both writers. Even though I’m insecure and jealous (aka normal), I know that reading her writing makes me a better writer. She’s a journalist and has honed skills through her profession that I reach for in my own work - she sets the scene, she wields specificity like a weapon. She forwards me emails with essays she knows that I’d love to read. Don’t get this wrong - we are not best friends because are both writers, but after this week together, I’m only beginning to see how the act of writing yields a closeness I don’t have in every relationship. I remember the simple, perfect joy of free writing for ten minutes and reading it aloud to each other.
*
You were right, the roll was not loaded correctly. I had a suspicion we’d messed up when we were around our twenty-third frame and I didn’t feel a tug when advancing the film. This is not the first time this has happened to us, I offer Kelly as she reloads Jasper. All of our photographs were gone - gone to us, but technically the photographs never existed. She looks at us with these giant puppy eyes, like, I can’t believe I let this happen to you, and I feel empowered, like this was the plan all along.
You were right, we were the only non-romantic pair in the workshop (from what I observe). It’s curious to notice how I feel insecure that others perceive our relationship as less than if it is not romantic, how annoyed I am that this will publish on Galentines Day because of a calendar, because the prompt was for Valentine’s Day and because I don’t (I won’t) understand why we would ever need to separate our friendships from our relationships.
You were right, I think this roll turned out better than it would have if we’d loaded the camera properly the first time. Throughout our twenty six+ invisible frames, Jenna and I warm up to the workshop. (Writing for myself) I get out of my own head, my own tendencies and visual crutches. In the restrictions of a packed studio after sunset, I allow myself to celebrate a friendship I couldn’t live without through a medium that I’m often reluctant to own. I’m a writer. I’m never a photographer.
At the close of the workshop, as promised, we develop our film. Kelly talks us through the chemistry of it all, but I’m dying for the end result. It’s like the lottery when our number is called. Jenna and I squeal as the negatives are unfurled, revealed to us for the first time - such a unique and intimate experience, to view the negatives of a roll we’ve just exposed. How magical! To see myself through the eyes of someone who loves me.
That was absolutely beautiful! I loved this post and the bond you have for each other!
You are missed!
Great one