We Were Supposed to Find an Abandoned Manor
The plan that wasn't
The original idea was simple: Mihai and I would hit the road for the weekend, find an abandoned manor somewhere in the countryside, and photograph it. That was the whole plan. Clean, contained, easy to explain to anyone who asked.
We never really found the manor. Or maybe we stopped caring about it at some point along the way — I'm not entirely sure which. All I know is that the road kept offering us other things, and we kept saying yes.
Pulling over for light
That's sort of the thing about shooting film on an open road — you can't plan your way through it. Every time the light hit a field in a way that felt wrong in a good way, or a landscape showed up that had no business looking that strange, we'd just stop. Pull over, get out, stand there for a second. Sometimes we shot, sometimes we just looked.
“There were quiet moments that felt impossible to drive past. I don't know how else to put it.”
At some point we crossed paths with a few shepherds. I don't remember exactly where, somewhere on a stretch of road that all looked the same and somehow didn't. We ended up staying longer than made any practical sense — talking about nothing in particular, about the road, about life in the way people talk when there's no rush and no agenda. Small things. Nothing dramatic.
That conversation ended up being the part I remember most from the whole trip.
Where I am right now
I've been thinking a lot lately about what I'm doing with photography and where I want it to go. I'm preparing for university admission this autumn, and that process has pushed me to be more honest with myself about what I'm actually after — not just technically, but in terms of what I want to say, or notice, or remember.
Looking at these frames now, I think this series says more about where I am creatively than I initially realized when I was out there making them. There's something in them that feels less about getting the shot and more about being present with whatever was in front of us.
“Lately I've been trying to understand photography in a more honest and personal way. I think this weekend was part of that.”
On shooting film
Everything here was shot on film. No digital backup, no chimping, no knowing until the lab calls back. Just loading the camera, making a decision, and moving on. There's something about that constraint — the not-knowing — that I find genuinely exciting rather than just romantic in theory.
When the scans came back, these frames felt alive in a way that surprised me a little. I think the uncertainty is part of it. You can't be precious about film the way you can with digital. You commit, and then you let go.
Maybe that's not so different from the trip itself — no manor, no fixed plan, just instinct and whatever showed up.
