Keenan Billings ’25 embarked on a photography project to explore and illuminate the unique capabilities of expired film and ancient cameras in October of 2022. Now, an exhibit showcasing his work is currently located on the second-floor art gallery, where it has been since April 3 and will be until April 28. It was a self-directed project, which Keenan pursued with the aid of Upper School Photography Teacher Andrew Warren.
Keenen said he was first introduced to photography through his friends and gained more experience with film in the school’s photography class. He quickly became interested in expired film in particular.
“I started this project because I thought playing with the effects of the old film would help create interesting photos both scientifically and creatively,” Keenan said. Film cameras use physical films, which are coated in a light-sensitive emulsion that captures photons when a photograph is taken. When the emulsion expires, the photograph preserved on the film can undergo unpredictable changes such as color shifts, fogging, or enhancing of the grain.
“It adds an element of unknown to photography because I didn’t really know how they were going to look until I developed them, so it was interesting not knowing what I was going to get out of them,” Keenan said.
Keenan said he added content to his project whenever he had the time in the past year and a half. To take his pictures, he often traveled to places far away, such as a beach or a ski mountain, he said.
“Seeing the project come together was really awesome after working on it for so long,” Keenan said.
Keenan said he tried to “find settings that would emphasize the film being degraded.” For example, one of the photos on display captured a sunset where the sky had been golden, but in Keenan’s expired print it appeared a darker and more neutral tone, he said.
“There’s more to art than meets the eye,” Keenan said. “I just think it’s cool. I think it’s fun. I find it very relaxing as an activity, and I get very excited when I line up a perfect shot, develop, and print it.” Artistic projects also help take his mind off the pressures of school, he said.
Because some of the cameras he used were older and Keenan couldn’t fit the modern, narrower film reel into the camera that had been made for the thicker film, he enlisted the help of his friend, Nate Walker, a student at Newton North High School, to create a 3D-printed adapter to load the narrower film into his camera.
When it came time to produce physical copies of his photos, Mr. Warren granted Keenan permission to use school facilities to process the film. For the largest photo on display, which is 24” by 30” and too large to print at school, Keenan and Mr. Warren uploaded the file to Staples’s printing software, creating “the biggest student photographic print I have seen here at school,” Mr. Warren said.
He admires Keenan’s ambition and drive to innovate, Mr. Warren said.
“I really appreciate his boundless curiosity and the fact that he’s willing to take creative chances. That’s an awesome hallmark of an artistic student,” Mr. Warren said.
Mr. Warren is glad to witness a growing interest among students of Keenan’s generation in experimenting with analog film, he said.
“I’m always excited to share any student artwork with the community, but I also think that there’s a really cool crossover between science and art in that exhibit. It’s very rare that someone would be excited about that, to have a roll of film that expired in the early 1900’s,” Mr. Warren added. “I think that there is a growing popularity in a population of people who are in their teens to 20s for totally archaic, analog film format, and I think there’s an interest in looking back at that stuff.”
Diego Abadie ’26 appreciated the opportunity to view photographs created in a different manner than what he had learned in Introduction to Photography, he said.
“They’re very different because he used old film, so it’s very different from the photos that I took and how I took them, so it’s interesting to see the differences between regular film and older film,” Diego said.
Alex Mohsen ’25 was also excited to be exposed to a new type of photography, he said.
“They’re very interesting photos, especially in film. You don’t really see that nowadays. I think it’s really cool in the different aspects of photography,” Alex said. “With this experimentation and finally, almost perfection of this expired film, it’s definitely creative.”
Keenan plans on returning to shooting digital and standard photos on film and continuing to display them on the second-floor art gallery, he said.
He is not sure what he will do with his photographs once his showcase ends on April 28, he said.
“I don’t want to keep it at my house because I want to look at photography with a fresh perspective and leave this project behind because I’ve done as much as I can possibly do with it,” he said.
