Photographer at the Crossroads
Musings on a Dilemma, written in 2005
It’s no secret — photography is at the brink of a new era. Digital cameras, scanners, ever-growing computers, and inkjet printers are taking over the territory once ruled by film and obnoxious chemicals, by gelatin-silver and dye-coupler prints, and by artists working in darkened rooms of red and amber light and no light at all. The world is going digital, and nowhere is that more evident than in photography.
Let me share my predicament with you. As a photographer, I, too, am standing at this brink — looking forward at the exploding technology of digital image-making and a hardware/software vortex of escalating obsolescence so immense that it sucks the quarters out of my pockets just thinking about it — and looking back at traditional tools and processes, just as good as ever, that I’ve now used for 37 years, wondering if I need to abandon them.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not stuck in a must-do-one-or-must-do-the-other mode. I use several film cameras. I also own a digital camera and use it for a variety of practical tasks in addition to photographing my granddaughter. I’ve been working with images on the computer for years, not only as a photographer, but as a newspaper and magazine editor, and, for nine years, in the production of a mail-order catalog. Digital image capture and manipulation are tremendous assets to anyone involved in publishing and printing, not to mention website creation and the sharing of images via email.
But when it comes to my personal photographic work, I’m not ready to give up the physical existence of a simple, flimsy, transparent piece of film with a negative image on it, an image made up of millions of tiny particles of silver suspended in a thin layer of gelatin. This is something whose longevity I can believe in, that I know will survive any computer crash, that can be reliably trusted as a historical record of a specific place and time in the real world. That’s important to me as a documentary photographer.
So, that’s settled. I’ll continue to expose film for my important work. I can continue to use my existing cameras and lenses, which work perfectly in spite of 17 newer generations of automatic-exposure, automatic-focus, automatic-flash, automatic-composition models on the market. The film doesn’t care!
The rest of the dilemma is not so simple. Even if I use film for my original exposures, I could still choose to print them digitally. This would require just under a gazillion dollars and lots of empty table space for a new computer, this week’s latest software, a pricey film scanner and a big state-of-the-art inkjet printer, all of which would probably be obsolete by the time I got home with them. Don’t even get me started on the lack of a gazillion dollars. I understand that, no matter what happens, I need a new computer: you don’t get to continue working in this society with a nine-year-old computer, even if you’re a nice person and your computer needs are very simple. Never mind that my workhorse camera is now 23 years old with no operating-system-compatibility problems anywhere in sight.
Setting aside the cynicism, however, it is possible to make wonderful prints on modern inkjet printers, and the inks are permanent, too (not as permanent as traditional black-and-white prints, but more permanent than the universally accepted dye-coupler prints from the ubiquitous photo-finisher). They are not the same as traditional prints, but that’s another matter. Personally, I don’t like the inkjet prints as well as traditional prints, especially in black and white, but it’s more a matter of taste than quality. As digital printing continues to improve, the choice will become more and more difficult.
What’s the alternative? The alternative is to build a room. A room with hot and cold running water and a sewer connection. A room with heating and cooling and so tight that no light could leak in. A room about 9x16 feet with a level floor and 11 feet of sink for making traditional black-and-white prints up to 20x24 inches. That’s a nice-size darkroom, and there’s a space at the back of my garage where it could go. Will it cost a gazillion dollars? I don’t know, but it won’t become obsolete in a month, or even ten years. Would it make me happy, having my own darkroom again, after a hiatus of seven years? Duh! I’ve been doing my film processing and printing in a rental darkroom in Sacramento. It’s a great gift to have a place where you can go to do your creative work. But it can’t compare with having your own darkroom or studio.
There’s another reason for me to lean toward staying traditional. I don’t make a living as a photographer, especially as a documentary photographer. My pictures are often of subjects you wouldn’t want to hang in your living room. So, I have to work for a living, and the job I do keeps me in front of a computer screen 40 hours per week. Do I want to spend the bulk of my creative time in front of a computer as well? Yuck! Give my poor radiation-riddled body a break! Instead, I would prefer to be a man standing in the dark, smelling chemical fumes, and watching images appear magically in a tray of swirling developer.
Lest I get too greedy about my not-yet-built darkroom, I am reminded that great facilities are not mandatory for great works: I teach photography workshops twice each year in the venerable Gladding, McBean pottery in Lincoln. In the old modeling studio on the third floor, I’m able to show my students a small darkroom, less than five feet square, where, 100 years ago, 8x10-inch glass-plate negatives were processed and printed by the modelers as part of the process of making architectural terra cotta ornamentation for buildings all over the west. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Dust, the scourge of photography, was rampant. But out of that little room came a collection of historical photographs among the most important in the entire history of Placer County.
Gene Kennedy, January 2005
