»My heart beats for the beauty of analogue film with all its uncertainties and blurred contours, for physical material, for being able to hold on to time, space and emotion direct!«
– Dagie Brundert

»For some time now, I have been experimenting with alternatives to the usual environment-polluting developer stuff. And then I stumbled on Caffenol, a black-and-white negative developer which in fact many photographers have already tried. There are lots of various recipes and all kinds of advice circulating on the internet! Caffenol consists of instant coffee, vitamin C powder and washing soda. You can get all three for little money at the corner store. I recommend you buy the least expensive type of coffee because it has the most caffeic acid in. Which may be bad for the stomach but for developing film it’s vital! Plus, after using it, you can easily get rid of the soup by flushing it down the loo. Anything else? Various things from the kitchen and garden or your immediate
surroundings: beer, wine, tea, apple juice, flowers, weeds, schnapps. It smells interesting, is organic and develops just as well as environmentally harmful chemicals! Black-and-white negative.
Why? Super 8 is an extremely sexy material. It’s warm in colour, produces incomparable grey tones and black hues that you never achieve digitally. It’s also mysteriously fuzzy in parts, with a natural grain, and it’s not 100% predictable. Yet even development mishaps can turn out to contain a miraculous aesthetic surprise! Also: playing with food is a lot of fun. You open a bottle of well-tempered red wine and pour yourself a glass. Shake the rest into a measuring cup. Or you cook up a bitter-smelling floral / herbal tea, add vitamin C and washing soda, stir it and enjoy the sudden chemical reaction that lightly bubbles, warms up the soup by two degrees and changes from red to green-bluish. Now take a careful sniff of that fragrance never before-experienced and revel in the feeling that somehow you are close to (healthy) matter, art and enjoyment!«