“Photographers are magical beings who work mysteriously”, said filmmaker Carlo Cresto-Dina in a recent conversation. It’s the mystery and uncertainty of the process of image making that made me embrace photography. Conveying to the world what I saw in the form of a print and the challenges it posed to succeed in the process was magical.
Complete the shoot, run home, process the film, dry it quickly, inspect the negatives and choose the frame, run to the darkroom, print, and run to the press office to dispatch the prints to the newspaper. This used to be the life of a freelance photojournalist in the mid-80s. An advertising photographer would shoot, keep the sets as they were, send the assistant with film to the processor, and wait for the turnaround with bated breath, in spite of testing the exposure and composition with instant film. A handful of photographers with personal labs or those photojournalists who worked for large media houses with their darkrooms were spared the running around.
I grew up in Mangalore, a small town on the western coast of India. It was a time of scarcity. Films weren’t available easily there. To buy my favourite film rolls, Ilford FP-4, I had to go to Bangalore, which I did twice a year and bought 10 rolls at a time. Each roll cost INR 20/- not a small sum for those days. Frames had to be rationed, and film used judiciously. One had to make each frame count. Analogue photography is inherently slow; the practitioner must understand and learn the process of pre-visualisation. Knowing exactly how the image would be, frame it in mind, and even before looking through the viewfinder, the shutter was released.
Photographers of my generation or the practising photographers of the generation senior to us have lived through four tectonic shifts in photography. The first was the arrival of autofocus lenses; the second was the introduction of computers and image processing software – therefore, hybrid photography, the shift to total digital and now the post digital, AI-enabled image making. This essay does not aim to reminisce about the golden age of photography or nostalgic feelings of analogue photography. Instead, I will discuss four thought streams related to why analogue photography is important and relevant.
The oft repeated phrases “technology has made photography democratic” or “today everyone is a photographer” are incorrect. While digital technology has made the process of making an image easy, not everyone with a device is a photographer. As we live through an era of information overload, we have fallen into the trap of information being perceived as knowledge. The great photographer Gordon Parks said, “If you want to be a photographer, you must have something to say”. Analogue photography, with its inherent slowness, helps us develop the capability to see the world with clarity.
One of the most important skills a photographer must develop is seeing the world clearly, especially in the current times, where the true picture is hidden among the layers of information, misinformation and disinformation. To do so, one must look with intent. The great colourist and advertising photographer Eric Meola said this in a post on Facebook in 2014. “It would be several weeks before I saw the image because I was, of course, shooting film. But I realised at that moment that my life had changed and that I had been privileged to witness a precious few moments that also marked a passage in this young boy’s life. I remember opening the box, spreading the slides onto the lightbox, looking intensely through a loupe and seeing this image for the first time. That moment of recognition has changed. We glance at our camera’s LCDs as we would an image on an iPhone–an image flashing a scene for a few seconds. The connection of a “latent” image hidden in the darkness of a film canister is gone. That sense of something precious and unique is now consumed by the world’s production of imagery. Today, in the single minute it took to open the box of processed film and find this image, 210,000 images have been uploaded to Facebook. In the next 24 hours, another 302,000,000 images will make their way onto Facebook’s servers. Three hundred and two. Million images. In one day. But for that one moment, as I looked through the loupe, I knew I had made an image that was important, and that had changed my career and my life, forever” He was writing about an image, a portrait of a young man, photographed during the Shinbyu ceremony of him becoming a novice Buddhist monk in Myanmar. The image was made in 1995.
All images are not photographs. One of the downsides of digital image taking, mostly by one’s phone camera, is the process has become increasingly casual. We have begun to see the world through the display of our phones. Though the display of any smartphone is at least three times that of a medium format camera, the ubiquity of technology has reduced our ability to look with intent, hence, see clearly and pay attention to details. This is not the problem with technology, but how we use it.
When we used film to make images, the print was the photograph. As soon as the shutter was released, the latent images formed on film. It had to be processed to make the negative and printed in the darkroom to make the photograph. Though colour direct films or transparencies didn’t have an intermediate negative process, the image on the film became a photograph when it was printed using a reversal printing process or on paper using offset printing. These steps did cause a bit of a generational loss, yet the images appealed to the viewer viscerally. There is an enveloping softness, something intangible in those images that tug your heart. Shooting with film teaches you the craft of photography, visualisation and patience.
I am reminded of a paragraph from a paragraph translated from Girish Karnad’s autobiography, Aadaadtha Aayushya.
“I am not interested in reminiscing. However, I would like to mention the two dimensions of my childhood that are lost forever.
First is the experience of total darkness. Sirsi had no electricity when we were in the house attached to the hospital. We did not get an electric connection at the house in Rayarapete either. So, for ten years, my family experienced darkness rather, savoured it. It doesn’t mean that I am anti electricity! It would be foolish to be so.
Today, the light that floods our homes when we press a switch has robbed us of the delicate and uncertain relationship with light. Even in pitch darkness, our eyes pick up the faint strands of light and create imaginary objects. Darkness is closely related to silence, too. In that silence, faint strands of light emanated and stimulated our senses in hundreds of ways. The universe of light from kerosene lamps, candles, little earthen lamps, petromax and (flame) torches used to reflect from earthen walls, wooden pillars, cow dung smeared floor, the roughly woven rug and create many textures. This beauty is lost in the monotonous shadowless light from fluorescent and incandescent bulbs today. We have to search for that softness and diversity of light.”
The seeming ease of image making with the help of digital technology robs our capability to see the world and the layers of colours, tones, the subtle differences in contrast and the stories that hide in these layers.
I reached out to two respected photographers who practice analogue photography extensively and asked why they make images using film. One of them is Louie Palu, a documentary photographer and filmmaker. He uses film and digital mediums equally and uses film only if he decides a project and approach is best done with a medium format square camera, so not just any format of film. He says, “Let’s be honest, digital assets are not “archival”, even the prints made from inkjets are nowhere near most works on paper, especially properly processed silver prints, which have a long track record of lasting. Most archival silver prints and their negatives can only be destroyed if you deliberately try to destroy them. Digital can fail independently, such as with a hard drive that stops working due to age or mechanical failure. This does not include ageing technologies, machines, and constantly changing cables to view digital files. One day, jpegs will be like Beta video tapes or other out of date media. Negatives simply exist, and last, you don’t need electricity to look at a negative or a print; they can both be stored in a box. A negative and a silver print will simply just exist and last. In the age of disinformation, you can’t manipulate a negative without it being obvious. Thereby making the film the ultimate recording device for documenting something.”
Fergus Heron is a UK based photographer and educator. He uses a view camera to photograph natural formations and urban environments. He said, “My use of a view camera is part of an established method I’ve worked with for the last twenty-five years. The camera is important for a number of reasons that include the perspective control it enables (mainly rising lens movement) that gives the pictures I make a structure with minimised foreground. This, I feel, clearly presents pictorial content, sets of buildings and/or trees for example.
Additionally, the camera I use requires assembly every time a potential picture is seen. As a technology – or set of technologies – optical and mechanical, it decelerates the process of photography at the initial point of exposure and produces a latent image. The memory of the exposed image mixes with the anticipation of what the development process of the exposed sheet of film will reveal as a negative. A mix of precision and chance is involved; not everything I see is noticed at the time. The camera sees in addition to me. Once film is placed in the camera, the view is invisible to me, as is the exact moment of exposure.
The processed negative is contact printed initially, then usually printed at an enlargement of five times the negative. This degree of enlargement reveals a high-level of detail. It enables the frame of the picture within the print surface to hold the viewer’s attention in a way that can acknowledge both the realism of the picture and (with the unexposed surface of the paper visible as a white border) the artifice of the print.
The printing process uses a colour darkroom. As the darkest of all dark rooms, it is a counterpoint to the outside world. In the darkroom, tests are carried out to achieve a combination of brightness, contrast, and colour that is as close as possible to the view seen and exposed in a camera.
Memory is a crucial part of the darkroom process. The memory of places seen is intensified and exercised in cooperation with the process of testing for desired aesthetic qualities. At this stage too, a combination of agency and contingency is involved. What is technically correct, is always considered in balance with what the picture looks like and feels like as a result of the process that has its own agencies.
The work I make combines new and old in a number of ways, from the content to the process. I see photography as essentially analogical; from its utilisation of optics and perspective, to the light sensitivity of its materials and developmental principles. Technologies of photography, everyday experiences and memories of places are multiple and interrelated.
Beyond the theoretical rationale for my methods, I value the pleasure in the craft of making colour pictures with analogue photography, the sense of refining a process over a long duration, and the relative permanence and material presence of pictures in this form.
Archives
From the advent of photography in India in the early 19th century, images were made mostly on special occasions, portraits to mark life events, family portraits in studios which were family occasions in themselves, weddings…etc. There were few photojournalists and advertising/industrial photographers in the country till mid-80s. They documented India and our visual history. They have created a vast number of images, which are the records of the passage of time. However, we in India have a poor sense of history and do not see the need to conserve them. Hence, many archives are lost, including those of noted photojournalists. Many archives might be languishing in the form of negatives, transparencies and prints in forgotten corners. Funding and effort are needed to restore and make the archives available to researchers, artists and society.
Photography can be therapeutic. Analogue photography can be even more so, as it is deliberate and slow. Memories gain a certain physicality when the print is the photograph. The team at the Bronx Documentary Centre in Bronx, New York, teaches documentary photography with film and the darkroom to children and adults. It has changed the lives of many.
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