Sep
19
drowning in pictures…
Filed Under Photography
This is kind of a strange post, but I sometimes find spitting things out all organized-like helps me think…
I’ve been a professional photojournalist for many years (though I’ve been promoted beyond my personal point of incompetence and rarely shoot for work any more). I was lucky enough to begin my career shooting film and was trained not only in 35mm but medium and large format. I’ve also experienced the birth of digital photography first hand: my first copy of Photshop was version 1.0 and came on a single floppy disk. I was lucky enough to experience the best of both worlds from the very beginning of my career.
All of our work now, of course, is digital. Even in my private work, I find very little reason to shoot 35mm film, though I do maintain a fondness for the extremely wide tonal latitude of B+W film.
Over the years, as digital has gotten better and better, I’ve sold off virtually all of my film equipment– EOS film bodies first, a few medium format cameras, my Leicas and both of my 4×5 view cameras (a cheapish monorail and a fantastic Super Graphic). I still have a single EOS1n dedicated to shooting Illford XP2 film, but the digital Canon 5d’s I use now are absolutely without question the finest hand-held cameras I’ve ever used, period. Image quality is stunning, and the digital work flow is, at least for me, a dream. The quality, combined with the ease and speed of digital work flow, has pulled me away from film almost entirely.
About 6 months ago, we had our first child, a daughter. As any doting father, much less a recovering professional photographer, I’ve shot literally tens of thousands of images of her already, almost all digital. With digital cameras, I’m shooting with wild and liberating abandon. But I’ve started to grown less than completely satisfied, not just with the end product but the process itself.
Everything she does for the first time (or last time) reminds me of how fleeting life is. Quickly made digital images, no matter how technically perfect, seem inadequate to capture not just her changing life but the world around me. The small, fast camera will always be a constant companion, but I want more… a process that pays respect to the gravity of capturing life as it passes by and disappears forever.
So, I’m arriving here: I’m ready to invest in an 8×10 view camera and start working again not just in film, but in large format, black and white contact printing (i.e. where you take your 8×10 negative and print it by placing it directly onto a sheet of 8×10 paper, sans enlarger). This is basically the same process used 100 years ago, though I’m not quite ready for glass plate negatives yet. Even using modern film and chemistry, it is a basic, unforgiving, even crude way to make pictures.
My goal isn’t necessarily to capture moments in excruciating, high-resolution detail, though that’s part of it. My mind’s eye is far closer to Sally Mann than Ansel Adams. I crave the unintentional errors I’m sure to suffer while wrestling with this fussy, slow equipment and laborious process. I can’t wait to start snapping up 100-year-old lenses on Ebay just to see what they’ll do.
It may be that I’m starting to become infected by nostalgia or romanticism, but I don’t think so. This feels like a thoroughly modern, if not completely rational impulse. I’m going to sit on it a little while longer, though, just to be sure…
But I do know I feel the need to start making images that are more like memories– absolutely perfect in some ways, soft and distorted in others. Somehow that just feels right to me, at least right now.
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