About

Imagidiem – An imaginative image per day.

A year-long creative outlet / exercise.

Dan Arango

At night we turned off all the lights in the apartment and drew the heavy curtains.We moved the enlarger to the kitchen, set up the trays of chemicals and settled in for the family pastime.

I was nine years old.  I can still remember how magical it felt to see the images developing on paper soaking in the trays.  Contact sheets, timers, red safety lamps, prints drying on clothespins in the bathroom.

Mom was in charge of developing the film.  She had small, nimble fingers.  She had mastered the skill of rolling the exposed film on to the wire spool in the dark.  Dad ran the enlarger.  I set the timer and counted down the exposure.

I must have inherited my love of gadgets from mom and dad. Dad brought home tiny Minox and Rollei camera’s back from his travels. We had Canon cameras and lenses.  And when I got older, I started taking pictures myself.

The passions of youth sometimes fade as we mature.

Joe vs. the Volcano (an underrated movie) is about an existential awakening for Joe Banks.  He has fallen asleep, and only a life-changing event wakes him.  One of the other characters in the movie tells Joe:

Patricia: My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.

ImagiDiem is my way of waking up.