The King is dead,long live the King- a rant

You know how it is.

You go out and buy yourself a new car, say for example, a red Mitsubishi Lancer. For the next week or two, as you drive around town, you never cease to be amazed at how many other drivers have exhibited the same good taste as yourself. Everywhere you look, it seems the roads are packed with other drivers, all driving red Mitsubishi Lancers. Then they slip into your blind spot, and you stop noticing them. About the same time as your obsession with your new car fades …

I’ve been having a similar experience with film. It may be because I been shooting a bit of it lately; it may be because I have finally got my hands on a good-quality film scanner and am having to relearn all that scanning stuff again; it may be because I’ve been hanging around Doc far too much lately and taking what he says seriously, or (heaven forbid) it may be because the medium is starting to grow up.

I can remember the early days of digital and the myths perpetuated by people who should have known better. I can remember going to a Kodak-sponsored seminar around 1992, where the suits from Kodak promised us all there wouldn’t be any film left on the market by 1996. On the other hand, I can remember being told that digital photography would never replace film (usually the people who said this had a distinctly plaintive tone in their voice). I can remember being told that  real (read: film) photography would remain mainstream forever. But I had my doubts.

Then the digital tsunami washed across us, and suddenly everybody had turned digital. Film photographers were now seen as being about as current and up with the play as an abacus, or a horse-drawn chariot at a formula one car race. Suddenly it was as embarrassing to admit you were a film photographer as it was to admit you were incontinent, that you drove a Lada, or that you were passionate about Morris Dancing. Film photographers were social pariahs, and to turn up at a club meeting and use words like Rodinal or D-76 or developing had about the same effect as a mongrel mob member walking in the door at a Tupperware party. It simply wasn’t done. So film photographers worked away in their dark rooms, forgotten and misunderstood.

Of course, if you were a film photographer, the price of your tools dropped overnight. The Mamiya RZ 67 rig you had lusted over for years suddenly dropped in price by $10,000. If you had one, you couldn’t give it away, and the very best second-hand shops just didn’t want to know. If you were a film photographer, and a canny one, then it was like being an alcoholic accidentally locked overnight in a bottle store. It’s still rather that way. By and large the secondhand dealers don’t want to know you if you have a medium format kit for sale, and most of them will only sell on-behalf. At the time I considered selling my Canon  EOS1vHS, possibly the finest 35mm SLRs Canon ever made. Brand-new, it cost me $4500. When they offered me $600 to trade, I was so insulted , I decided to keep it. I put it away carefully, not sure if I would ever use it again. It wasn’t that I ever intended to use it; it was just that the thought of throwing away such a fine instrument offended me mightily.

But the times, they are a-changing. Having now begun to shoot film again, simply because I like shooting film and I like the results, it seems to me I am seeing red Mitsubishi Lancers wherever I turn. And it seems to me the film renaissance is gathering momentum.

I do have some evidence.

Not long ago, the online markets (Trademe and eBay) were swamped with film cameras. You name it, it was there, a glittering array of supposedly-obsolete photographic technology. Hasselblads, Mamiyas, M-Leicas, Bronicas and more large format cameras than you could shake a developing tank at. To my eye, that has changed.Have you looked lately? Where have all the Deadorffs, Wistas and Ebonys gone? Only the rubbish remains. Which presupposes one of two things: either they have all been bought, or their owners are quietly getting them out of the cupboard, and, heaven forbid, perhaps using them again.

The camera manufacturers are continuing to release new emulsions. Kodak has reformulated its venerable T-Max 400, and even released a new colour negative emulsion, Ektar 100, which is every bit as tricky to expose as its ancestor, Ektar 25. Fuji film were about to discontinue Fujicolor Pro 800Z until the market shrieked loudly and they realised that perhaps there were more users than they are at first thought.

I will admit that the days of film as the mainstay for the point-and-shoot crowd are long gone, that those people don’t really want to know about analogue photography. It’s so much easier with the digital compact, a case of pointing and shooting and then downloading to the computer. All those precious personal memories are stored safely on your computer hard drive (until the drive fails, or the burglars turn up). It seems to me however that out there upon the horizon, things are turning, that film is becoming more socially acceptable, and there is a movement back towards it. Again, your honour, may I present my evidence.

In this article from Photographyblog, Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin writes about photographing the Tongariro National Park and the adjoining Whanganui river for National Geographic magazine (the real Geo, that is, not one of the pallid local pretenders). Reading the article, he describes the tools he used, including (horror!)  a 4 x 5 and sheet film (Velvia-yes, you can still get it!) alongside a 39 megapixel medium format digital.

And here lies the germ of my argument.

For too long, it seems to me, we have had the photographic equivalent of a championship boxing match. In the left corner, weighing in at anything from 6 to 25 megapixels, we have digital photography, the brash newcomer, full of itself and its own importance, believing itself to be the one true faith. In the right corner, battered and on the ropes, weighing in at between eight and 36 exposures, we have film, feeling very exposed indeed, feeling as if it has lost its way, and really doesn’t knowing what it is doing there in the harshness of the floodlights. Film has been on the ropes for years, as digital gains skill and strength and self-confidence.  However it seems to me that, while it may be down, it is definitely not out. And therein lie the beginnings of a new maturity for the medium.

To say that one is better than the other has the same to ring to it as the myopic protests of a fundamentalist Christian, who bears a remarkable similarity to a fundamentalist Muslim or indeed a fundamentalist anything. Maturity, it seems to me, lies in the recognition that there is more than one cake to be had, and that it’s possible to eat them both.

The Third Way may finally be at hand, where we have the truly skilled, who understand the strengths and weaknesses of both, realise that they are both valuable and to-be-valued tools for communication, and are able to select the appropriate one for the task at hand.

In the Third Way, film is as valued as the sensor, and picture-making choices are made on the basis of what is to be said, not how it will be said.

At this point, you stop seeing only red Mitsubishi Lancers, and realise that all the cars around you are of value.

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Published on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009, under Thinking about Photography and Art