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.

Changing gears for a day. After the studio shoots I'm cycling back to a smaller, handier camera for a spell. Blame Robert Frank.

too many gadgets? The hand grip, the thumb grip....

Here's the "stripped down" version:

Less comfortable. But less bulky.

The purist's configuration.

Have you ever clicked on to a documentary about a favorite photographer and, when the show finished you were ready to adapt his style for your own work? I've always enjoyed the work of Robert Frank. I think his photography is direct and fearless. So I was happy when someone sent me a link to a documentary with and about Robert Frank, on Amazon Prime video. It's called "Don't Blink." 

The video was done in 2015 and Frank was, at the time, in his late 80s or early 90s. He was still quite sharp, irascible and opinionated. In part of the video he was walking around on the Coney Island beach and reminiscing about a series of photographs he'd taken there 50 years earlier. He had photographed strangers on a beach packed with people and his photographic efforts went on all day and into the night. 

In this scene he talks about using a small and discreet camera and moving quickly. Shooting quickly. As he's talking about this the video camera pans to a young, current-day photographer walking around on the beach with a big DSLR, big zoom lens, big camera bag hanging off the shoulder/back. Sticking out like a huge, sore thumb. And Frank remarks that to get the images he wanted when he shot there he had to be less obvious. Less plodding. Less stiff. He had to move fast and carried only one small camera and lens.

Through the video the only time a camera is in the frame it's a small screw mount Leica camera with an equally small 35mm or 50mm lens on the front. That's it. No zooms. No light meter.  No telephotos and (obviously) no special mirror gadgets involved.

Watching the video triggered for me a memory from an earlier time in my non-linear progression as a photographer. I was working as a copywriter for an ad agency and my passion was photography. At the time I was using an ancient Leica IIIf screw mount camera. A camera model that dates back to the early 1950s. A time before the M series Leicas were introduced. 

I was always working on a budget so I rolled my own film with a bulk loader. Always Tri-X. And when using those earlier Leicas you had to trim the leader of the film in a certain way if you wanted the film to load and advance properly. Scissors were a necessary accessory. Always. Probably the sole reason I first bought a Swiss Army Knife. Always having scissors in my pocket. 

One week I took a break from work. It must have been in 1979. I was at my parent's house in San Antonio and itching to go somewhere out of the country, to have an adventure and take photographs. This was long before I was married. Long before I had any sort of responsibilities. No constraints on my time.

I packed a few pieces of clothing in a small backpack, dropped all of my gear (one Leica IIIf, one 50mm f3.5 collapsible Elmar lens, my Swiss Army Knife and twelve rolls of hand rolled film + a passport) into a small shoulder bag. A repurposed, non-photographer bag. And asked my older brother if he'd drop me off at the San Antonio airport. This was a time in which one could arrive at the airport, look around at the various destinations on offer right now and be on an airplane heading somewhere within a half hour. Security check? Didn't exist.

The destination that looked best (and cost least) was Mexico City. I paid $36 for a plane ticket and headed out. I arrived at the airport in Mexico with no hotel reservations and no real plan but I'd read about a hotel on the Zocalo (main square) and it seemed interesting so that's where I headed. I spent a week going to markets, the park, the pyramids outside of the city, the Zone Rosa, the Anthropology Museum and even the National Pawnshop. I had a wild breakfast one day at Sanborn's House of Tiles and walked without fear or trepidation through the downtown  a couple of nights at two or three in the morning. 

My constant companion was the tiny Leica rangefinder camera. So many good memories even if the photos I took were less than spectacular (no light meter, still learning to print, still learning my way around composition). It was the process, the time spent, the adventure that made the trip an important one for me.

What an interesting time. No cellphones. No internet. No credit card. No schedule and no fear. Just one very small, very rudimentary camera and  the desire to make photographs. To see things. Heaven.

So this morning when I woke up I was still thinking about Robert Frank, photographic adventures, small cameras, discreet photography and thinking....even if "discreet" isn't the pressing issue, how much fun it was to travel so unencumbered. So light. So quick and so free.

I had a camera in mind today that I thought I'll circle back to. It's the small, handy, Leica CL. The digital one. That and the smallest modern lens I could find. The little Carl Zeiss 28mm. It's like a 42mm (short normal) on a 35mm camera. The camera is also just about the size of the old IIIf...

I set the camera to shoot black and white. I'm enthralled with it. But mostly as a symbol for adventures. So much history calling out to photographers....

And here I am getting ready to shoot a portrait in the studio with a big MF camera. Odd times.

Would there be a market for a camera like the ancient Leica IIIf I shot with? No frills. No automation. No huge size. No high value. Just a lens, a shutter and a sensor. Not even a light meter? I'd buy one. But then I'm eccentric enough to part with the cash...  You?