The modern world, far from singularly benefiting from the
advances in technology seems to find itself trying to figure out the state
which it inhabits. From my
earliest days in school, in the 1950s, I can remember being told that not only
would advances in technology and knowledge benefit mankind, but they would do
so on a scale which previously had been unknown since people first began
huddling together by fires, thousands of years ago. In fact, when you think of the jump from no fire to
fire, you would have to go pretty
far to find something quite as change rendering in the last few hundred
years. Most of the things which we
take for granted, and reflect the ‘modern’ world we know are barely considered
by the majority of us. We just
imagine that they have always existed.
Yet between electrification and the expansion of water & sewer
lines, I can’t imagine a world any darker than what existed prior. Our modern world is in many ways devoid
of , above, the smells of what went before. Open sewers,
carriages drawn in the main by horses and oxen, must have produced a
stench that the early days of even Park Avenue would have found to be
unrecognizable. When you think
about it, the vision which humanity brought to the problems of the day was a
thing of beauty. What must a young
aspiring engineer have thought, that his life’s work would be the movement of
sewage from one part of a city to a lesser inhabited section, and eventually
that it be ‘treated’ so as to become almost unrecognizable. To me, that is the kind of advanced
thinking which was the true sign of genius. Building a system (system meaning it covered thousands of
blocks, all interlaced, rather than just a stretch of perhaps chic dwellings
whose owners could afford it) was just the kind of thing which would have
unleashed further innovation.
The space programs of the 50s and 60s carried with them
dozens of innovative break throughs which brought both product and form to us,
things which before that were only pipe-dreams. The arrival of the transistor enabling miniaturization on a
scale previously unknown, launched the digital age we live in today. Hundreds,
then thousands, and eventually millions of switches whose glory was found in
their ability to say Yes/No, On/Off, One/Zero. What
does any of this have to do with my own chosen field - photography – in the period of time I have practiced
it? Well, I started taking
photographs for real about 50 years ago.
I was on the Olympus High School year book staff, and in an effort to
advance my C.V., at the urging of my mother, a Journalism major from Stanford
(‘38) I’d applied in order to seem perhaps more than I was. Not only an engaged student (advanced Math and Chemistry) but someone
who was a nearly “compleat student,” in the words of Issak Walton. Yet that first day in the “Titan”
darkroom – a wet lab about 8x8’ on the second floor of the school, under the
tutelage of our very corpulent but dedicated math teacher (the “advisor” for
the photo program), I had that singular moment when I saw my first photograph
appear. It must have been a
picture of something as mundane as the French Club, two rows of earnest looking
students, the back row of which was standing on a stair so as to be visible
over the heads of the front row. Shot with either a 4x5 or 6x6 camera, the shot
was ingloriously lit (one bounced
potato-masher strobe) but so full of detail that you could see the lint
on dresses and shirts. Yet it
wasn’t so much the picture itself, as it was the alchemicaic wonder which was
unleashed in that red-tinted room when the sheet of photo paper, after a few
seconds exposure under the enlarger, was slid into the tray of developer. Very slowly an image started to
appear out of nothing. The shiny
white of the paper was replaced by a hundred shades of gray (yes, twice as many
as Fifty) as that paper became a photographic print. In my very informal poll of a few dozens of photographers
over the age of 40, all of whom started their photographic lives in a similar
way, each of them has spoken with an almost breathless wonder of the that
moment when they first saw a photographic image develop in a tray. Later, there would be the smells of
dektol, stop bath, and fixer, each with its pungent and unforgettable personality, and stains on fingers when both
gloves and tongs were traded for the more tactile approach of grabbing the
print in your fingers, blowing on
it, rubbing it like aladdin’s lamp, in order to bring out some small extra bit
of contrast or density. It was
extremely hands-on, and very personal.
You touched your print from the moment it started to exist, and carried
it through the process till it sat dry, and perhaps curling, on your kitchen
table. Nikki Kahn, a very talented photographer with the Washington Post,
who was kind enough to give me a late night ride back from the outlands of
Andrews Air Force Base, following a Presidential trip, spoke almost glowingly
on our short ride of her memories of those first prints. How it was magic, indeed, to see an
image come out of the nothingness of white paper. And more importantly, how sad it is in the modern world
where virtually no photographers under the age of 25 have even been in a
darkroom. The whole of their
photo-lives has existed in the world of digital – the last 12 years or so, and
they have seen it marked by the existence of screens on the back of cameras,
tiny monitors whose job it is to show the artist/image maker just what they
created seconds before. The first
time we saw an image appear on the back of a camera it was, well, kind of
exciting. But can that, or the
disgorging of a print on a large format Epson printer slowly, mechanically,
methodically -- can it compare to
the sorcerer like vision of a Kodabromide paper reacting to Dektol in the
developing tray? One is interesting,
yes. But the other is transformative.
An almost complete rendering of one of THE cardinal rules of the first
160 years of photography. Big is
small, bright is dark, less is more, thin is heavy. The understanding of the photographic negative, where
greater density of the film inhibits the passage of light while thinner, less
intense blockages permit more light to pass through, have become in many ways a
holistic concept of how to view life, to view the world itself. The “negative” becomes a rather
useful metaphor to see how events in the world transpire, as much as it is for
understanding how projected images treat light.
I was rather slow to fully adopt the ‘digital’ model in my
photographic work. From about 1998
onwards, it was clear that to a large segment of those working in journalism,
the speed of digital turn around was the single most important factor in trying
to deliver a product to market.
The Associated Press has for decades adopted the motto “a deadline every
minute..” referring to the fact that around the world, amidst the thousands of
newspapers who relied on their production, there would always be a paper on
final deadline, be it Columbo, Cali or Khartoum. And whatever could be done to shorten the time between a
photographer witnessing an event, and the delivery of that picture to a client,
should be done. There was a desire
to try and cut that time from what was once days and weeks (before telegraphy)
to mere seconds. Speed of delivery was the single biggest
factor in determining whether or not
a newspaper or wire service shooter had done a good job. For someone like me, who shot for
weekly magazines, it was a different story. I could still use the traditional film I knew well, have the
luxury of those few days to use a pro lab to bring those images to market. Yet, more and more, the creeping of deadlines was to alter even the
magazine model greatly. Even weekly or monthly magazines felt some vague need
to be “online” and show their works on the internet, and once that happened,
even people like myself were obliged to consider getting pictures to market
much, much quicker.
On breaking stories, the paper & wire guys would have
their laptops set up to be able to just pop in a memory card, immediately load
the images into PhotoMechanic or another of the very efficient editing and
“ingesting” programs, do a quick choose, and equally quick “treatment” in
Photoshop (managing color balance, contrast, sizing, and of course captions)
and send the picture on some available wifi network or a small cell-network
enabler. The latest incarnation of
this chasing of the second hand was to be seen at the London Olympic
games. Teams of editors, often as
numerous as the photogs they were working with, would man large screens on the
receiving end of a feed. The
sending end – the photographers, would be set up to be able to send virtually
every picture they made to the editor, sometimes in the same building, but
often across town at the Press Center.
The speed of networks is such that large scale files can be sent
quickly. I first saw this in the
winter of 2010, when I was in Boston to help judge the Boston Press
Photographers association annual contest.
One of the members of the local group, a Reuters photographer, was
moonlighting as a Winter Olympics editor.
His laptop would receive a flow of images from Vancouver, as they were
shot, and he would be the one who would decide what would actually go out on
the network. It was an amazing
example of how the speeding up of networks has created our own domestic version
of outsourcing. An editor no
longer be located right were the pictures are being taken, in order to get the
job done.
But if you are someone like myself, who shoots RAW format
(wherein all the information the camera sees is stored in the file) instead of
JPEG (a much smaller, more nimble file which is created by the brain of the
camera FROM the RAW file, then stored on the memory card) the speed of turn
around isn’t quite as deliriously snappy.
The files are four to five times bigger, and require a lot more
computing power to deal with. You
can do all kinds of more subtle altering of the files in RAW, and it remains
the format of choice for ultimately coming up with the highest quality
image. So in the real world, there
are essentially two tiers of digital photographer. The ones for whom Speed is king, and the others who give up
Speed, for more Quality. Which
isn’t to say the JPEG images are garbage. I have seen 40x60” prints from a JPEG
file which look fabulous. But in
the end, there is that dividing line.
There are surely times when I wish I had been able to speed up the turn
around on some of my digital files. And I know any number of wire shooters who
freely admit that in a perfect world, they would prefer to shoot RAW and have
the additional control and utility
of those files. For the wire and
paper photographers, all of whom are constantly trying to eek out just one more
picture before the plane takes off or the bus departs, their world is governed
by that speed of turnaround. Yet, because of that necessity, when the end of
the day comes, they are essentially done.
Their pictures have been catalogued, named, captioned, put into folders
(or at least the Selects have been), and they can freely drop their gear in their
hotel room and head to the bar for a beer. Richly deserved, and, more importantly, enabling them to
talk to the folks who know what tomorrow is about – staff people, writers, and other photogs. They are already, essentially trying to
figure out what is next for them.
Some poor slob like me, unable to do the quick turnaround of
my large-scale files while on the press bus to hockey, or a taxi to gymnastics,
is in another boat altogether. And I do mean canoe, and I don’t mean paddle. In London (or on the road with the
President) I would finish shooting an evening event at some unseemly hour, and make my way back to the hotel via,
usually, the press shuttle bus.
That alone was about ¾ hour ride, and in a perfect world, where I wasn’t
carrying 40 pounds of gear, I’d be able to use that time to my own profit. But things don’t always bend your way.
I would get to the hotel often at midnight or 1 in the morning, skip that right
turn into the bar, and head straight to my room. There I would assemble the memory cards in a small stack. It
often came to 40, or sometimes even 60 gigabytes of data. I would set up the “caption” field in
Photo Mechanic with all the information I could remember from that day (Men’s
Decathalon, Women’s Syncho Swimming, etc etc), create a folder and file
names which would later be
searchable on a purely time basis
(BUR_YYMMDD_LondonOlympics_Day2_1723.CR2) and start flogging the images
off the memory cards and onto a purchased-just-for-the-occasion Hard drive. It would take sometimes ten or fifteen minutes for a single
card, and I often had six, 8, even ten cards to do. It seemed I never got to bed before 3 a.m., only to have to
rise again the next morning at 7 or 8 and head out to do it all over
again. Each morning I would awaken
with the feeling I had somehow been cheated out of a proper restful night. Tyranny? It surely felt like it. No doubt there were better 'work flows' I could adopt, but it all seemed aimed at making me sleep deprived when I needed rest most. There just didn’t seem to be enough
hours in the day that I could manage so that the work load of both shooting and
file management was done with confidence
and competence. In
addition, I was exhibiting signs
of retrograde camera envy. Besides
the digital cameras at hand, I wanted to shoot with my 1940s Speed Graphic, a
beautiful old beast of a press camera, with a 1943 aerial recon camera lens on
it. I have shot with this camera
for a decade, and find that when I look into its amazing viewfinder, I see
things I just miss with my digi cams.
The old lens, long and fast, sees the world in a very different way than
the Canons, and in many ways IS a perfect foil for the smaller more agile
counterparts. First, it uses
Film. There is no practical
affordable digital back for a 4x5” camera at least not yet, and frankly I kind
of hope no one develops one anytime soon.
There is, in the use of film, film holders, and a semi ancient camera,
something very satisfying, very “I have to get this in ONE shot,” something
very, shall we say, Romantic.
It’s as if I have joined the colleagues of my chosen field
from prior generations, the ones who didn’t have much of a choice. For them there was no 5 frames-per-second, instant-return
mirror, auto focusing & auto advance & auto metering. There was just a
big-ass box of camera, one that required looking onto a ground glass to focus,
a shutter which needed cocking by hand, a requiste series of events which had
to happen in a very specific order, or the picture just couldn’t be taken. And yet when something good happened
with that camera, it was really, really good. Was there some way to imitate that look? In some ways there were elements of
‘the big camera look” which might be copied to a digi cam, but for the most
part, there was something in the hideously slow way of shooting which led you
to a different outcome. That said,
the percentage success rate was miniscule. If, in my 300+ frames of black-and-white film I find twenty
images I really like, that will be an overwhelming success. The film is currently at the lab in New
York, where, on a good day, one of the lab techs might inspect a single sheet
of film in the ruby red atmosphere of a dimmed darkroom light, and see another
form of that alchemy we so loved in the youth of our photographic
apprenticeship. He might just see
something which represents a moment seen weeks ago on TV, whether it be a young
spritely gymnast, a take-no-prisoners handball player, or a trained horse whose
idea of a good time is to walk with great precision and elegance in
dressage.
For me perhaps the strongest feeling of kinship which took
place at the Olympics surrounded the way in which my camera was welcomed by so
many photographers. People I
didn’t know would see me carrying this kludgy beast, in addition to far too
many cameras & lenses, and wish me (or the camera itself) good luck. There
was always a faint glimmer in their smiles, as if seeing the old film camera in
the middle of all the digital gear was like running into a long lost
great-uncle, one who you’d lost track of, who you thought might have died
barely noticed a decade ago. Some
part of your family which for all those reasons we know so well, just didn’t
stay connected, and who you assumed had lived his life, and passed on. Yes, there was a kind of affirmation,
that even though we have entered this world of a digital presence (and not just
photography but in every other aspect of our lives) that there still remained
some role, some kind of leavening effect, something that couldn’t be ascribed
to merely Zeroes and Ones on a piece of silicon, which would give us
satisfaction and pleasure by its mere existence. At least a dozen people asked me if it were
still possible to get film “in that size,” and though each week it becomes more
difficult, I think there are enough die-hards – particularly in Eastern Europe,
that for some years to come we ‘ll be able to find black and white film in
several styles and speeds.
Color? Who knows, as that
market slowly whittles away. But B/W is the founding force of photography, its
singular beauty and strength
carrying a visual message which is hard to equal. And while I often succumb, like so many
in our trade to the ease, and speed, and yes, quality, of digital
photography, I’d like to think
that there is a place which my Speed Graphic will have for years to come,
unfettered by the Tyranny of the Ones and Zeroes. It has become a part of my life, my family, my being. The metallic rap it makes when you ram
a film holder into the back is one I never tire of. The finger-snapping sound the shutter makes (different
sounds at different speeds ) is more satisfying than a Beethoven concerto. The simple and innovative beauty of its
construction, a prized example of industrial engineering in the mid twentieth
century makes me wonder if the hand of man can truly be equaled by
machines. And of course the most
intimidating question of all: am I up to the task of taking it places, showing
it things in a way that is good enough to let it shine. Everytime I open it up, put a lens on,
and attach to my tripod, I wonder if I am up to the job. But seldom in life are the tools which
fight tyranny so easily mastered, and when I’m done shooting, and slowly re-bed
it in my old worn but perfectly fitting backpack, I know I have done some small
work in keeping alive the creative hands of the past. We’re just sayin’… David
