Essay Extract and Photographs — ANNE MARIE BASQUIN

The essay I’ve been working on has gone through many iterations but I have nearly narrowed it down and finished it. It’s about photography, moving to NZ when I was eleven, paua-diving for the first time, and trying to find a sense of belonging. A lot to cover. I think it really needs to be a book… I can’t share the whole thing here as it would disqualify the essay from the competition I am going to enter it into at the end of the month, but here is an extract.

My mom gave me her decades-old Canon TX manual film camera. I hadn’t discovered that vintage was cool yet, but I loved everything about that camera. The stick-and-circle simplicity of the inbuilt light meter, the manual adjustment of shutter speed and aperture, the winding on and off of film, but most of all the heavy clunk of the shutter. In my hands, its substantial weight was satisfying, anchoring. The strap was faded and strained from use, its history, my mom’s history, apparent in its folds. The camera and strap were sturdy enough to last for decades, long enough (I dreamed) to accompany me on surf trips and into war zones.

Below are several photographs I’ve taken on the Canon TX over the last two and a half decades. I never took the Canon TX on surf trips or into war zones, but I carried it devotedly around New Zealand, India and Southeast Asia.