You may enjoy this feature from the NY Times last year, if you'd not seen it: "Essay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age"
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/essay-slow-photography-in-an-instantaneous-age/
Interesting, with wonderful pictures.
Dan, the "slow food" movement was the beginning of what we now call the "local food" movement in most of the US; it originally took hold on the west coast but is now found throughout the country. It's meant to be the antithesis of the fast food / industrialized foods movement. If interested, pick up the book "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan...
Anyway, Mainecoonmaniac, in my opinion, the photographic analogy to this movement would entail mixing of your own chems, making your own plates, coating your own papers, and being more conscientious about disposal. Investing in that entire process would indeed be much slower than the clickety click approach now found throughout digital photography. But I don't think merely working with the "old" film methods would go nearly as far, in spirit, as the slow/local foods movement goes. The spirit of that is really to take total responsibility rather than assuming that someone else will do it for you. And frankly I don't think there is any proud history of that in the film industry, which was scaled up for mass production since the invention of roll film. (Not that I think digital is any better in this regard, mind you)
Cool. I'm a foodie too- I spent a lot of time setting up a minifarm on a University campus, where students grow all manner of things and have begun to enjoy cooking again. I consider myself very lucky to have met Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin a few times; they are of course two of the most interesting players in the local food movement on the east coast. Brother Wendell has a print of mine, and I look forward to doing some shooting at Salatin's farm next year and try to make something he would like.
In many ways, the enemies of the slow food movement... speed and convenience for its own sake... are also enemies of the craft of handmade photography. Quick 'n easy has taken over almost every aspect of our culture.
I'll have to Google Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin. I'm a west coaster and we have Pollan of course and Alice Waters.
In the age of speed, convenience and instant gratification, we have lost the art of enjoying anticipation. With industrialized and convenience foods, we have an abundance of low quality food. It's somewhat true with images too. With digital photography, people are able to produce tons of images with little or no thought. I do think digital photography is perfect for disposable commercial images used in advertising. With some art photos, old methods are better. It looks like the slower analog photography is becoming a fine art process like lithography or etchings. Food just like photography, you have eaten and experience real food before one knows that it is. I'm discovering a whole generation of young photographers are going to galleries and museums and seeing analog images and liking what they see. A Hot Pockets generation eating a Chez Panisse and enjoying the food and the experience perhaps? :munch:
Working with large formats is the equivalent of slow foods. The discipline and pace of working tends to spill over into subsequent work with smaller formats.
Ian
Ecchh, please don't equate Alice Waters and analog photography! Rather than "slow" photography, I much prefer "chemical" photography since that's really what we're talking about. The "slow" food analogy just doesn't work on any level for me, nor does it clarify the separation from digital. Anyone spending hours at a computer futzing in CS5 with colour correction or tone mapping knows the meaning of "slow" all too well.
With photography, the "slow" you get in photoshop is not the same as the "slow food" analogy referenced here. Just as it takes hours upon hours to get something just right in photoshop, I'm sure McDonalds spent countless hours tweaking the formula for the McRib barbecue sauce or choosing the right bun for the Angus Burger. Once that's done, though, they can be spit out endlessly, uniformly, without thought or expertise. Once you are done adjusting your file in Photoshop, anyone with sufficient manual dexterity to click a mouse button and load paper in the printer can follow directions to make additional prints that exactly match your original master print.
Hand-coated alternative processes, however, are very much the equivalent of "slow food". Every step in the process must be done deliberately and carefully, and cannot be handed over to an untrained novice to repeat successfully. In each gum bichromate print I make there is a little blood, sweat, tears and love of mine invested. The difference is that between a technician and a craftsman.
The "slow" food analogy just doesn't work on any level for me, nor does it clarify the separation from digital.
With respect, that's baloney. Not obvious from this you've spent much if any time retouching in CS or any other Adobe product.
Ecchh, please don't equate Alice Waters and analog photography! Rather than "slow" photography, I much prefer "chemical" photography since that's really what we're talking about. The "slow" food analogy just doesn't work on any level for me, nor does it clarify the separation from digital. Anyone spending hours at a computer futzing in CS5 with colour correction or tone mapping knows the meaning of "slow" all too well.
I don't see that "Slow" only refers to the time spent doing something (driving a golf buggy to work would be slow but not Slow). It's as much about a philosophy or a state of mind as it is about the rate of work.
In our interconnected, "always on" world it's sometimes good to step back, return to first principles, and make a conscious decision to invest yourself in what you're doing. Learning to do something yourself (rather than rely on the wizardry of software engineers) is Slow; and it's immensely rewarding.
And I wouldn't agree that there's a specific analogue/chemical versus digital angle. Blasting off 10 rolls of film and shipping them away to the lab isn't Slow (even if it's slow).
Is Slow the only way of doing things? Of course not. But it's a good way.
You can have a long attention span with analog photography and do it Slow.
After reading Sea Photo's thread going back to "Real photography", I'm wondering if there's an the same movement with foodies called "Slow Food" movement started in Italy. The commonality is returning to old methods because the new methods of production doesn't yield the same quality. Am I way off base here?
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