When I here the word "importance", I tend to think "critical importance". And unfortunately, film is not critical to the survival of photography any more than wet plate is. It's a medium. Mediums come and go.
What's the importance of water colours and oil paints in a world with acrylic paint?
How important is the horse to transportation? It isn't. But it was critical as little as 100 years ago. The horse's place in society has changed, but is not gone. Now the only people who own horses are people who love horses and chose to make use of them. Horses are no longer important to transportation, but they are important to people.
The choice of paint type is unimportant to painting, but it is important to the painter.
Film is unimportant to photography, but important to photographers who value the mental process of shooing in film, who value the physical process of bringing about a print through certain (analogue) means, and who value a certain asthetic.
Film is unimportant to photography, but important to photographers who value the mental process of shooing in film, who value the physical process of bringing about a print through certain (analogue) means, and who value a certain asthetic.
Exactly, and not exactly.
Film and fine had crafted prints are important to me in order to do my best work. So when a customer is really into the image I made, they ask how I made it, the process becomes important to them, every single time. I have often been told months later that the owner of one of my prints proudly tells people who see it on the wall how it was made, it stays important to them too.
Don't discount the value of hand crafted in a world filled with digital representations...it seems to happen a lot on here and it is not how it is in the real, non-internet rhetoric world.
I don't disagree with you, Dan. Not at all. But it's strange to see such a mass exodus from the printed photograph at the same time.
I'm very happy to belong to a group of photographers around here who all value the printed photograph. We meet once a month and sometimes in between, just to hang out and look at each other's work. It's a refreshing thing to do, something we all relish.
Perhaps my analysis earlier was hasty, with respect to darkroom based photography being important to me for selfish reasons. Your example above of owners of your work being interested in how the work was created is encouraging.
I point I included in the speech was that getting "Pro results" was much cheaper on film. The quality of lets say a decent 35mm camera and lens and a roll of velvia would cost you less than 150$ USD including any lab fees. Getting these same results on digital would require much more expensive equipment up front. Granted, it costs you every roll you shoot and with digital it is essentially free. Same goes for medium format most young adults don't necessarily have funds to dish out for digital medium format and film medium format can be had for much less. You all do make a good point on the archivablity of film.
People miss prints...they really do.
If you would like a lengthy possibly controversial polemic relevant to this thread I offer the following essay. It was produced to accompany a recent photographic exhibition of mine that guaranteed the absence of any digital input whatsoever. The bits in parenthesis were included in the speech notes for rhetorical effect.
In Defence of Light-Sensitive MaterialsThe word photography was invented to describe what light sensitive materials deliver: pictures that offer a different class of imaging from painting, drawing, or digital methods. True photographs are pictures made out of light sensitive materials.
The content of such pictures is the visible trace of a direct physical process. This is sharply different to painting, drawing, and digital imaging where picture content is the visible output of processed data. For the record some other imaging methods that do not process data include life casts, death masks, brass rubbings, wax impressions, coal peels, papier-maché moulds, and footprints.
There is a general idleness of thought that assumes any picture beginning with a camera is a photograph. Most casual references to digital pictures as photographs are motivated not by deceit but rather by the innocent or uncritical acceptance of the jargon “digital photography”; a saying which has become so banal and familiar that it largely passes unchallenged; except perhaps here, now, and by me.
I use light sensitive substances to make pictures because of the special relationship between such pictures and their subject matter. The wonder of this special relationship is also available to the aware viewer. For the record some non-photographic means of making realistic looking pictures include photo-realist painting, mezzotint, gravure, offset printing, and analogue and digital electronic techniques. These pictures may resemble photographs but they do not invoke the unique one-step physical bond between subject and true photograph.
The physical (and specifically non-virtual) genesis of pictures made from light-sensitive substances has far-reaching consequences:
Light sensitive materials are utterly powerless in depicting subject matter that does not exist. A true photograph of a thing is an absolute certificate for the existence of that thing; an existence proof at the level of physical evidence. Quite differently, data-based pictures are at best a form of testimony rather than material evidence.
Light-made pictures require that the subject matter and the substances that will depict it have to be in each other’s presence at the same moment. True photographs cannot be fashioned to depict times past. The future is similarly inaccessible. Since true photographs can only begin their existence at the time of exposure in the fleeting present they constitute an absolute certificate that a particular moment in time actually existed. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
Light-sensitive materials are blind to the imaginary, the topography of dreams, and the shape of hallucinatory visions. The option of making a picture from light sensitive materials is an infallible way of distinguishing delusion from reality. A true photograph authenticates the proposition that the camera really did see something. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
Light-sensitive substances do not offer discretionary editing or augmentation of subject matter content. There is a one to one correspondence between points in a true photograph and places in real-world subject matter. This correspondence, also known as a transfer function, is immutable if only the subject matter changes. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
The sole energy input for a true photograph comes from the subject. The internal chemical potential energy of the light-sensitive substances is sufficient to generate all the marks of which a photograph is composed. External energy sources are not obligatory. Remember, photography was invented in, described in, and works perfectly in a world without electricity. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix all need external inputs.)
Pictures made from light sensitive materials are different to paintings, drawings, and digital confections in that their authority to describe subject matter comes not from resemblance but from direct physical causation.
It is these unique qualities of true photography, its limitations and its profound certainties, that keep me committed to the medium as an integral and original form.
My light-made pictures are produced one at a time, start to finish, and in full by my own hand. The work flow is mine. No part of it is down to assistants or back-room people toiling to flatter my skills so I will feel good about paying their fee. I’m committed to making pictures out of light-sensitive substances even if these materials cease to be commercially available. I can synthesize them myself.
Light sensitive materials are utterly powerless in depicting subject matter that does not exist. A true photograph of a thing is an absolute certificate for the existence of that thing; an existence proof at the level of physical evidence. Quite differently, data-based pictures are at best a form of testimony rather than material evidence.
Light-made pictures require that the subject matter and the substances that will depict it have to be in each others presence at the same moment. True photographs cannot be fashioned to depict times past. The future is similarly inaccessible. Since true photographs can only begin their existence at the time of exposure in the fleeting present they constitute an absolute certificate that a particular moment in time actually existed. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
Light-sensitive materials are blind to the imaginary, the topography of dreams, and the shape of hallucinatory visions. The option of making a picture from light sensitive materials is an infallible way of distinguishing delusion from reality. A true photograph authenticates the proposition that the camera really did see something. (Paintings, drawings, and digi-pix offer no such inherent guarantee.)
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