This birthday party was supposed to be a small one. I didn’t expect so many people to show up at what was supposed to be a cozy get together at my place. There were probably only a few drinks and a few songs between the first and last frame of this roll.
On this other roll, the first few frames were shot in Warsaw. Frames 5 to 13 were shot in Stockholm. Frames 14 to 20 were shot in Berlin, and all the last ones show the Espaces d’Abraxas, in the Paris’ suburbs.
Contact sheets
Contact sheets have something very special to them. They’re proofs of every single picture on a roll, and at the same time, much more than that: they tell a little story on their own. If you aren’t a film photographer yourself, you might have seen them in photography exhibitions or catalogues (the Magnum ones are probably the most famous I can think of).
The two examples above can hopefully help you understand why I feel like a standard 35mm roll of film containing 36 frames has been more than a small technical detail to me. I’ve personally always picked 36 frames rolls and still do, up to this day, mostly for cost efficiency reasons (developing a roll costs the same, no matter the number of pictures), and never gave it any further thoughts. On the surface, this has only ever been a very practical and economical decision.
Like the developed negatives you need to pick up from your lab, the contact sheet is a byproduct of photography that disappeared as the world moved from analogue to digital. The closest thing that today’s photography has is maybe the catalogue feature in editing softwares or the camera roll on a smartphone, and it’s not even that close. And that’s maybe because of the number 36.
Frame of reference
I’ve heard and seen different ways to deal with this limitation. Some people just carry a ton of rolls in their bag, some others just don’t care at all about running out of film. In any case, I believe this limitation has some impact on storytelling.
The two examples I shared earlier show you that 36 frames can span over a few hours, over a few months, or anything in between. This fixed number doesn’t really dictate or impose anything, but it’s there and acts as a frame of reference, whether you want it or not. “Whatever makes it to one of these 36 frames” is part of a story being captured.
36 frames shape the story in an very informal way. They sometimes tell the story of a single night, and sometimes tell the story of a few seasons. If we compare it to writing, it would be like an arbitrary limit of 36 words, 36 sentences or 36 pages. Respecting or bypassing this limit is totally up to you, but any story - short or long - can potentially fit into that format.
Something more abstract I really like is that a frame of reference asks about what’s not in it. I know the party kept going after the last picture of the roll, and I also know for a fact that the police showed up at my door, at some point after frame 36. In the second example, I have almost no memories about what happened between Warsaw and Stockholm, or between Berlin and Paris. These narrative and visual gaps actually contribute to the story simply by existing, but only when you look at pictures in the context of a contact sheet. Take each picture individually, and the story within the contact sheet literally disappears.
Positive constraint
Unless you are getting very close to the storage capacity of your phone or camera, you virtually have no upper limit on what you can capture and add to your story. The idea of being constrained by an arbitrary upper limit is just difficult to translate to the digital world.
You can find the argument online that says shooting film just costs more, and that alone makes it more intentional. I understand the reasoning but I don’t really buy it, based on my fairly long experience with the medium. I simply believe there’s nothing really transactional in the direction of photography, in relationship to the medium used. If it was really a thing, nobody would reasonably shoot medium or large formats, for which the cost of a single frame is painful. That birthday party being shot on film shouldn’t imply it was more intentional, and the cost of photography has nothing to do with the story being written. In the end it’s just a different medium, with different restrictions.
Without looking at it, I know the camera and roll I’m carrying right now only has a few frames left. I shot just over thirty frames on this roll, and while I don’t know when I will actually finish it, it’s just something I’m aware about. You can be just as intentional with digital as you are with film, but when you only have 12, 24 or 36 frames, each exposure counts a little more. Each picture should be as focused as possible, and working against a limit only reminds you about this fact. It’s a positive constraint, rather than a limitation.