An era truly has passed. I was at the bookstore at the mall today and there was a smallish book collection of National Geographic photography. I paged through it of course, and it grabbed me to the point of wife-annoyance. Some truly stunning images in technical and aesthetic senses were featured, most from the 70s through the 90s. The analog nature of the photographs was obvious even in the small format reprints in the book. The grain structure of the Kodachrome source material lends a veracity to the image that just makes it so impactful. It's not that digital images can't be impactful, but there is nothing like the embedded realization of physicality provided by film source material. One image even had a bit of obvious dust in the sky area that was not edited out. The text accompaniment mentioned the photographers directly viewing slides and dealing with changing film in arctic conditions. I hate to cling to the past and I'm the last one to defend obsolete technologies, but for something so close to art, the passing of the analog medium in popular journalism, and particularly National Geographic, is a very sad thing. I'm 23 years old, and I already can't help but be slightly depressed at how, in certain fields, technology can cause such regression in the guise of progression.
