For most of my life, a camera simply meant a camera and a photograph was an image on a piece of card. Photography involved plates, or film, and a chemical process. But the pride of place in our house belonged to an analogue TV, an ancestor of today’s digital imaging devices. Little did we know how what was inside the box was in time going to change photography.
Photography’s traditional domain was ”immortalizing” the reality. As students we joked, as we clicked our film cameras, “let me immortalise you”. We meant on film. Nowadays, a photo automatically means an instant, digital image. So that when you talk about film photography, film cameras, or darkroom prints, you must say exactly that: film photography, as distinct from the omnipresent digital.
My friend Serge, a great Swiss photographer says that with the digital everybody nowadays is a photographer. So what does it make him? He’s not sure.
Looking at tourists devouring London sights with their digital cameras, I see a slightly worrying aspect to this ritual. I suspect we may be losing the ability to take reality in unless it is through seeing it on a screen. And even though tourists went around with cameras for as long as there were cameras, nowadays the live viewing of one’s surroundings of a tiny screen seems more important than seeing them through one’s own eyes. Isolating it, framing it , slicing reality in order to virtually own it. If you don’t believe me, try this: see if you can turn of the display on your digital camera, then point it and shoot. And don’t review your images until you get home. And preferably not for a few days.
When you finally view them they will still be your photos, but somehow less so. Now, you may ask, why would I want to do that? Why complicate a simple pleasure?
Digital photography is photography, but it is photography by the means of a carpet bombing, leaving in its wake visual destruction…
And having said all that. I have just waved good-bye to my last roll-film camera, a Hasselbald 503CX. After my Canons, A-1′s and Leica-4 – I was no longer prepared to put in the hours necessary to develop and print. And if you don’t develop and print, you might as well not bother at all.
Now I am the proud owner of just one, large format, film camera. Ironically – this is even more work than roll film! Try loading a dozen dark slides. Try transferring the sheets into a developing tank (just six at the time)… So, for the time being - horror of horrors – I take a lot of iphone snaps.
