On the Art of Letting Go

Following on from my last piece about loneliness in shooting film, I’ve been thinking about what comes after that solitude, about the quiet trust we place in process, in chemistry, in time. This reflection sits somewhere in that space: between knowing and not knowing.

There’s a moment, just before you pour the developer, when everything is uncertain. The film sits in the tank, sealed, silent, and unknowable. You can’t see what you’ve captured. You can’t change what’s there. You can only trust that something will emerge.

Every time I develop a roll, I’m reminded that photography isn’t just about seeing, it’s about letting go. The chemicals don’t always behave, the temperature drifts, a light leak creeps in where it shouldn’t. But there’s a kind of grace in that surrender. To work with film is to admit that not everything can be controlled, and that sometimes the most beautiful things happen in the space between precision and accident.

When I started experimenting with beer developers and natural materials, that feeling deepened. Brewing a batch in a pub or stirring leaves into a jar isn’t chemistry so much as ritual. You mix, you wait, and you hope. There’s science in it, yes, but also intuition, a soft listening. You begin to understand that the materials want to behave in their own way. You learn to let them.

Leica 1c 1931

There’s an old word for this kind of process: alchemy. Not the pursuit of gold, but the transformation of the ordinary. Turning light and silver into memory. Turning chance into meaning. The darkroom becomes a small theatre of the unknown, a space where expectation dissolves and something new takes form.

In a world obsessed with clarity, it’s easy to forget how valuable unknowing can be. We chase sharpness, definition, answers. But uncertainty keeps us alive; it keeps us curious. When I pull a roll from the fixer and the images start to appear, faint and trembling with possibility, it feels like a quiet conversation with something larger than me. A reminder that I’m not the author so much as the witness.

In my last piece, I wrote about loneliness in the act of shooting film, how the quiet between frames can feel both empty and full. This feels like its counterpart. The unknowing that comes after the photograph is taken is a kind of loneliness too, but softer, more generous. It’s the loneliness that trusts something unseen to take shape in its own time.

Maybe that’s what draws me to film: the act of trust. The trust that light will leave its mark, that time will reveal something I couldn’t have planned. Every frame is a small act of faith, in process, in imperfection, in the unseen.

Lately, I’ve started to think that photography, at its heart, is less about making images and more about being present in uncertainty. You never really know what the world is offering you until you stop trying to name it. The lens doesn’t demand answers; it asks for attention. And the film, quiet and patient, teaches you to embrace what you don’t yet understand.

When the negatives hang to dry, I often stand and watch them glisten in the light. They’re fragile, imperfect, alive with mystery. Not everything developed cleanly. Some frames are fogged or fractured. But I’ve learned to see beauty there too, in what didn’t work, in what refused to be tamed.

That’s the alchemy: turning uncertainty into wonder. Learning that the unknown isn’t something to fear, but something to work alongside. The film knows more than I do.