Up-Cycled

Film photography is a wasteful endeavor.

A roll of 36 is loaded, armed, and shot. Prayers are said and (un)heard. The dark room reveals all. Mistakes happen. Even more so as an amateur.

But what happens to these dozens, hundreds, thousands of non-photographs collected over a lifetime? They rot, in the dustbins of the cloud, in negative folders, and ancient hard drives.

Their sin? Uselessness. Their very nature transgresses divine productivity. But what if they could gain (new) life?

What if their very nature as mistakes and aberrations made it so that they could become something more? Words find their natural place, and with a free flow of consciousness they are made anew.

Albert Camus taught us that seeking inherent meaning in this meaningless world was absurd. That we must create and find our own meaning. Up-Cycled seeks to do just that.

Skander Manaa

Born in 1998, Skander Manaa is a Belgian-Tunisian photographer based in Italy and traveling often. Finding Macondo is the realization of Skander’s passions. Shooting mostly on film, he seeks out moments we wish to come back to—those that pinch the heart and have us daydream. He maps out the magic of the real in the hopes of finding his own larger-than-life village.

• Instagram
  https://www.instagram.com/findingmacondo