My fathers Minolta X-700, circa 1981, with 50mm f/1.7 lens and motor drive, on my book shelf at home.
My first “real” camera was a 35mm Minolta X-700 SLR that I borrowed from my father when I was in middle school. He never got it back. Today it’s been retired and sits on a shelf and reminds me of him.
I learned the craft on film, in the darkroom, with wet hands and stained clothes and the odd chemical smell that used to follow all photographers around. Everything changed, it was slow at first, then sort of all at once, I was halfway through college, with two Canon digital bodies and handful of microdrive memory cards that cost a small fortune and held 500 mega-bytes (you read that right, mega-bytes).
Things got lost along the way. There is a large amount of work that I produced late in high school and throughout most of college that I have no access to. I’m not saying any great masterpieces were thrown away, though I wonder what I would find in that work if I did have the negatives and scans and original files that now exist only in the form of digital dust, ones and zeros on some zip disk (100MB each) at the bottom of a land fill or a hard drive that crapped out too soon or the CD-RW disc (750MB at most) that is now valuable only as a coaster. Granted a great deal of this could have been avoided by better “archive management” but let’s be honest, I was in my 20’s, I couldn’t manage much of anything. Just digitize it they said, it’ll last forever…
No. 0001_15 - Mission Street. San Francisco, Ca. May of 2003. The 15th frame of the first roll of film I’d exposed after consciously deciding to change the way I was approaching my work.
Around 2003 I gave up, or least began the process of giving up, on digital capture (I don’t ever want to think about custom white balance or firmware updates ever again). It was slow at first, then sort of all at once. It started when I really began to look at the work I was doing, and quite frankly, I hated it. It was cold and flat and precise, and none of those things interested me. I began to approach what I was doing as an aesthetically minded visual archive of materials that needed to be managed, and it changed everything. In May of 2003 I bought a used Leica, borrowed a lens from a friend, and essentially started over, roll No. #0001.
I understand, it’s all horribly cliché at this point, this whole film thing, the return of analog, the retro rebirth, whatever the influencers are selling now. But I realized somewhere along the way that as much as it was about photographs, what drew me to the work was also the objects themselves. I’m a collector; of images and negatives and prints and things that I want to remember and think about and keep close. Things I’ve deemed important, for whatever reason. Aesthetics notwithstanding, there is an argument to be made for the analog in a world that is continually accelerating technologically. I enjoy making things with my hands. Every single print I’ve exposed and dodged and burned and washed and toned and retouched and signed. It exists because I made it, not the result of some piece of software.
Retouching, captioning and signing silver gelatin darkroom prints, made by hand, by the artist.
The former vice president of google said some years ago “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.” This resonates now more than ever, especially in these days of “rented spaces” that are entirely out of our control. The “Enshittification” of everything online destroys all platforms (flickr, tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, dead or dying in terms of usefulness). The web at large has become “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”
What do we lose when we no longer have pictures to see and share and revisit outside of whatever platform is dominating the digital landscape? How will we access those platforms in the future, if they even exist? I don’t want to rant about how “it was better when” (maybe a little). After all, I’m writing this on a computer with several orders of magnitude more computing power than the first space shuttle, and I’ll publish it to what is essentially a worldwide audience by pushing from my house. Technology is great. But what happens when the lights go out…?
What happens when Square Space gets bought out or goes under or just decides to pull the plug because of something offensive I wrote? What happens to all the photographs I’ve made and things I’ve written and the drivel I’ve put out into the world? If nothing else, it’ll be in a box, in the negatives, in the prints and the books and all the things that I’ve put on paper, part of the archive. Like so many creative folks from Gen-X and the Elder Millennial generation I’ve become obsolete and I’m ok with that. There will be a record of what I did when I’m gone. One that you can pick up and hold and smell and feel the textures of in your hands. At least until they toss it out with the rest of the trash…
Things I’ve been reading lately…
The Gen-X Career Meltdown
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.
A Long Hard Look at America
As the transatlantic alliance falters, a major exhibition of U.S. photography offers Europeans a dizzying array of perspectives.
Safety Off
It might have something to do with being in proximity to people that are comforted, one could even say thrilled, by footage of humans being shackled and imprisoned.