“Seeing the picture appear beneath my
hands was wonderful. I was always restless to
see the finished product and would often work
through the night to develop the negatives and
print my photographs.”
As a self-taught photographer with no
patience for manuals or instruction booklets,
Burra claims that her tenacity alone carried her
through the learning curve of film photography.
“I taught myself through a winding and
beautiful way,” she explains, “I repeated
procedures until I exhausted my options, which
led to the results I was looking for.”
Such repetition and experimentation
transformed into a versatile experience, making
Burra the seasoned artist that she is today.
With the rise of the digital movement, Burra
remembers, “I struggled to accept the evolution.
The development process had changed, and I
seemed to have lost something important.”
At first, Burra mourned the loss of the labour-
intensive process required for film photography,
a method that forced her to earn each finished
print with hours of invested energy. Yet, as she
continued to develop as a photographer, Burra
realized that the digital approach introduced a
new realm of creative possibility.
“The practical world of digital photography
offered the right tools to create things I would
have never imagined,” she explains, “I realized
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