We had a visit last week at school from the editor of a magazine called Silver Shotz. He was an interesting guy who had a lot of interesting advice and examples of really interesting film based processing techniques, like cyanotypes and salt prints and the like. But in my eyes he undermined his whole talk by being decidedly and openly anti-digital. It’s one thing to be a film enthusiast and to spruik the joys of film based photo arts, as there is a lot of really good stuff you can still only do with film. But to take a stance that says digital is rubbish, and only film is any good is clearly a stance that won’t go down well in a 2007 classroom of photographers. It seems to me that it’s insane not to embrace digital. It’s not going to go away, that’s for sure. Film is the impending dinosaur, and it makes no sense to alienate the next generation to its joys.
Tricks like printing a shot in the darkroom (just casually mind you, no great care taken), and then scanning that image on a drum scanner and printing it out on the latest ink jet to prove that ink jets can’t match it with darkroom output are simply tricks. There’s so much room for bias in that process, especially when the person doing it has already made it clear they are anti digital in the first place… As one person said, ‘yes, the film based one looks a little better, but if I hadn’t seen that, I’d think the ink jet one was fabulous’.
Money is one thing that stops me experimenting more with film based photography. It’s an expensive hobby. The joy of digital is that you can shoot forever and it doesn’t cost anything in ongoing costs. Digital is improving rapidly (this is happening at about the rate computers have experienced in the last decade or so) and before long both capture and output devices will be the equal of any film based technology. So what is there to not like with digital? Are these just old men stuck in there ways, unable to feel the joy of digital? I accept that film based photography is a more hands on experience, but really, who likes the smell of the darkroom, and the toxic poisons used therein?
But I don’t need to be anti-film either. I’m not. I love film. I think the only logical position is to embrace both film and digital technology and get the best from both worlds. Photographic purists remind me of the old men who hated rock and roll and Elvis or art snobs who think photography is not art.
I rally against purists!! Death to the tyrants!! Run them out of town!!! OK, OK, I’ll calm down now, but you get the point. Don’t you?
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Agree with you here. I think the bigoted views (from either side of the fence) don’t contribute anything to our understanding about photography, and always seem to concentrate on issues of quality, or appearance. I think there is room for a purist approach using traditional analogue techniques, but not because it’s “better” than digital and not at the expense of all other approaches. One of the reasons is a purely philosophical one and relates to the ideas of truth in photography, and the old debate about realist and pictorialist approaches. Although analogue images can be as manipulated as digital, it is more difficult and is detectable. Digital process will tend to encourage more creativity (pictorialist) than analogue. This is one of the reasons why I still shoot all of my candid/street photography using analogue equipment. It’s personal, and people who look at the pictures will probably never know the difference, but for me the connection with reality, what Barthes called “what was there” is important - and I have the negative - that strange chemical footprint, or “indexical sign”. I can’t get this feeling with digital.