“Life is finite. The possibilities of life are infinite, but life itself is finite. So, too, is a roll of film. There are thirty-six exposures, maybe thirty seven, but not forty. You can’t see what you’ve done yet; so you’d better be able to know if you got the shot.

There is only so much time – so much film – with which to do what one must. Human capacity is limited. “I am not God. I am not capable  of of everything” Then consider digital media; I can edit indefinitely. I can shoot indefinitely.”  But one can not do anything indefinitely, and so we, in succumbing to a vision of a digital world, succumb also to the fallacy of unlimited capacity. We start to think we are God.

But we are not God. We are not endlessly capable. We are – each according to our own understanding – souls or energy or happenstance, but inarguably bodies, rooted in a finite physical and emotional experience of the Universe.

Can you locate a pixel? Can you touch it? Do you know what it smells like? Does it effect your senses in ay way, effect your person? How does it change the way you look at things without pixels? Do you notice? Do you mind? Something in the rhythm of film is enlivening. There is an organic  rightness in waiting for something to happen, living through the stages of actual process.

Immediacy is unnatural. To wait for the film, wait for the proofs, wait as the paper changes in the developer, wait while the print washes and dries and finally arrives as a Photograph in your hands: all of these stages hold mystery.

The mystery teaches me patience, dedication, perseverance.”

Willa Mamet was born in Cabot Vermont, and raised in New England and Los Angeles. A devoted film user, she works with Leica M cameras and prints in her Oakland darkroom. Her photography includes portraiture, performance work and fine art.