Scratches and Metaphysics
Selected instant photography (1)
Hello! I’m currently working on a few upcoming pieces — including a fifteen-thousand word long conversation about the history of trance music — that will be coming out over the next few months, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a selection of some of my recent (and not so recent) instant photography, since I’ve been shooting a bit more again this year.
I’m basically a total dilettante when it comes to photography (don’t ask me to shoot your wedding), but it’s a fun hobby for me and I like that, unlike with writing or music, whenever you click the shutter, you will end up with a finished image, even if it ends up being bad (which it often is, but for every ten duds there’s usually a decent image hidden in the pile). If you are interested in my general process, I wrote about it in more detail in this post on instant photography and electronic music from 2023:
You may recognize some of the images below from the cover art of previous posts, but I thought it’d be nice to post them in a higher resolution than just a thumbnail somewhere — and I frankly also don’t really know where else I would even post them, since it seems like Instagram is really for everything but photography these days. So without further ado, here’s some scratches and metaphysics!
Metaphysics (2025/4-7)
These are pure analog film manipulation with no digital post-processing, as is the case with almost all of my photos. I usually shoot a few packs of film at a time while playing with a certain approach or technique, which often leads to a “series” of images with similar characteristics. In this case, I was using LED lights to create the coloured backgrounds and making use of metal household objects like cheese graters for the film manipulation. There’s something quite organic to the scratched textures on these images that I like, almost like bacteria under a microscope.
Inventory (2024)
This was shot in my parents’ garden. It was a very sunny day, but the lighting and tone still came out looking a bit somber, which I think fits the mood of the images quite well.
Waters (2025)
These are all from a recent session where I held the camera directly against a full bottle of San Pellegrino (I’m a real mineral water head, and S.Pelle is probably my fav!) with the flash on. The “stars” in the first image are a result of the flash trying to make sense of the water’s bubbles while refracted through the glass.
PS: I know there are visible dust particles on a lot of these scans, but with my low-tech scanner setup I can never seem to get rid of them entirely, and in our age of AI-generated everything I almost kind of like them as a reminder of the physical existence of these images, haha.
Metaphysics (2023/1-3)
Maybe a bit more “fragile” than some of my other scratch-based abstracts, the cuts and scratches in this series are all quite light. The green-ish background texture in the third image is actually a shot of a window in my apartment — I was experimenting with randomly swooshing around the camera to get these interesting motion blur texture backgrounds.
Ultra (2022)
I don’t remember the exact technique I used here, but I think it was probably more pressure based, as there are no clear cuts or scratches. This series really came out looking a lot like digital negatives, very “mid-1990s album cover” — OK Computer!
Verdant (2023)
This was shot in Barcelona. It was an extremely bright summer day with the sun out in full force, which will generally produce the best figurative lighting the Instax format is capable of — it really does soak up all of the light and turns it into these nicely lit, but still fairly warm tones in a way that I think a digital camera just wouldn’t without a bunch of filters and post-processing.
Fractions (2024)
I don’t quite remember how exactly these came together, but I think it was another experiment with shooting “through” watter bottles. I really like the idea of drawing these weird abstract inner worlds out of simple objects. Even with just the camera flash, glass, and liquid, there’s an almost infinite amount of variance at play that leads to very different images with just the slightest change in lighting and position.
Metaphysics (2025/1-3)
These are fairly recent. I was trying to go back to some of the things I was doing around 2021-2022, but they came out with a bit of a different feel. I was being pretty heavy with the pressure on the scratches, which resulted in these very thick, almost graffiti-like lines. The red flares in the top corners of the third photo came from microwaving the film for a few seconds (be careful if you try this!). The yellow texture in the bottom left of the second photo is a fingerprint mark. These always show up in yellow for some reason. I’ve never been able to figure out how to consistently reproduce them — simply applying pressure with a finger won’t do, it seems like there’s a pretty specific set of circumstances that has to be met for them to appear … I like the element of surprise though!
These are way cool. Are you scratching the film before developing or manipulating the negatives? Home development or lab? I’ve been making rayographs recently, and there’s so much fun analogue photography techniques to try out there!
Wow these are gorgeous