Clarifying my position on old film cameras versus modern digital cameras...

 

Former assistant, Renae. Photographed on black and white film

with a medium format camera. 

Can I pinpoint when I thought film was the most incredible medium in the art world? Sure, it was the decade from 1990 to 1999. Black and white film emulsions were outrageously good compared to absolutely everything that had come before. And 120mm black and white roll film was so, so, so much easier than using hand-coated, glass plate 11x14 inch "film." 

That decade, the 1990s, was also, in my opinion the highpoint of printing paper manufacturing as well. 

But that is all in the context of comparing what we could do with film and paper during that decade with everything that had been used in the past. 

There were ten years following the turn of this century in which, at least black and white image making floundered and was much less successful. At least for me. 

With the mass acceptance of digital cameras of all manner the sale of film, and processing chemicals and printing papers plunged. Flat-lined. Got insanely niche. Got truly expensive. If you were a working photographer you probably needed to trade in that closet full of Nikons or Canons and Hasselblads or Mamiya 6x7s to try to afford a single professional digital camera. And once you made the trade you probably spent years tearing your hair out trying to get back to a black and white image that was even one tenth as good as you could have made in the days of darkroom magic. 

In relay running parlance it was all a bungled hand off. The "baton" got dropped over and over again. 

We tried fitting ink jet printers with gray, and other gray, and black inks to get a non-color contaminated paper print. But mostly we just spent like hedge fund managers on ink to feed the ever clogging heads of our printers. The results? Not so much. Clumsy. Flawed. Frustrating. And funny enough, hard to replicate from print to print.

Somewhere near the end of that first decade of the new century a lot of people who didn't need economies of scale and lots of daily/weekly throughput; not to mention that they weren't depending on their income from photography, just flat gave up. Tired of profiling and finding the right color spaces and explaining away burned out highlights and banded, noisy shadows, they retreated back to film cameras. Or what was left of them.

They learned where to have their film scanned. They scrimped and saved to afford $25 rolls of film. But in the end, for their uses, most amateur film shooters were much better off financially (as far as their hobby goes) than those techno-geeks of us who kept ever updating digital gear and hoping and praying that it would finally work just as we always imagined it would. And just as the camera makers kept promising it would...

The film fanfare happened. People believed in it. And for many it's a fun way to do photography. Still is.

But from about 2013 onward digital got better --- and then much better. And if you did a lot of photography the economics of it were and are now decidedly in favor of shooting digital. No argument that if you have the time, the budget and the patience you can get absolutely great stuff from medium format film and a traditional darkroom. In some ways, at least when it comes to rendering human skin, it's very different from digital and to many people it still looks better. But if you have lots of assignments, shoot lots of frames and need to turn jobs around quickly digital beats it hands down.

And if you've been experimenting with black and white digital for a long time we're now at the point where you can make great images. And routinely.

But having spent 25 years in darkrooms and making prints why don't I feel like rushing back to film now that I have the time and resources to do so?

Mostly because, if we are honest with each other, shooting, processing and printing film is a major pain in the butt. And if you skip a lot of the processes and just have your film developed and scanned you are most likely missing out on exactly the qualities that made so film good in the first place. You are basically, with a digital scan from film, getting less quality and less performance than you would from any of the current, high end, digital cameras. 

Last time I looked I had nearly a million frames shot for the business. The number of frames per job dramatically increased over the years, on a per job basis. Both from my own laziness and/or curiosity (to see what might come on the next frame) I shot a quantity of images that would have cost an enormous amount of money had they been on film. It would never have been sustainable with film. Not to mention that I would have routinely run out of time for.....everything else in life.

And, for the most part, I've gotten to the point where I'm happier with the images I'm making on current cameras than I did on film. At least technically. 

A lot of our desire to shoot film is nostalgia. We were young and beautiful. Our models were young and beautiful. And the feelings from that period of time get inextricably tied up in our memory with the cameras and films we were using at the time. We remember how beautiful our partners were and how much energy and amazement we had when things actually worked out that any associated part seems to rise in our memory as having been very important. That's probably why we adore our early prints. We're looking "through" them to the subjects. It's not the prints themselves, as objects, that deliver the value. It's that they are triggers for the memories they represent.

And, as humans, I think we value the struggle more than the results. At least I do. So our nostalgia and pride for the things we had to learn and practice to be even moderately successful in the time of film cause us to feel a sense of emptiness with digital mostly because it has become so easy to do the same level of photography.

That's not the fault of the cameras or the technology but our inability to change our presumptions that all good results take hard work. Or that the hard work itself is a feature. Or that we're getting graded on how much effort we put into something. 

I won't go back to shooting film. It takes too much time. Of course it's fine for people in their 20s. They have no real understanding yet of just how fast time rushes by. How precious it seems later in life. 

And, finally, there is the reality that photographic fashions and styles have changed. I know how to shoot as I did back in the 1990s and could replicate the technical processes but I no longer feel an allegiance to an older practice. I like trying new things. I feel that if I get locked into a practice for the sake of just continuing the same vision and point of view over and over again then I've become stuck. Not growing. Not learning. 

I would never have appreciated the current work of Daido Moriyama if I had not worked through the old work to new work. I'd still be stuck back in time, worshipping photographic work from decades past and unable to understand and value current work by current artists. 

It is sad for me to see photographers of my age locked into the work of the 1950s-1990s as though all the value of those photographs got codified and made permanent in that time frame. All that work has already been done. It's time to do new work. We see the past clearly. That's why it's comfortable. But the future? "One step forward all is darkness." We fear what we don't know. But, as I've said before, "The cave we fear is the treasure we value the most." 

So, no more film for me. And no more worship of large format, black and white landscapes, hollow art images presaged on early tech. Banal shots of empty baseball fields and bad color portraits of equally boring subjects. And all the other stuff that keeps us stuck in amber --- certain that our past was the zenith of photographic culture. 

I need to make a place for my work in the future I'll be living in just a few seconds from now. I already know what happened yesterday.