A More Pleasant View

I recently read this article in The Wall Street Journal and it warmed my heart. This article is by a fellow film photographer and he makes many good points about the cold and unsentimental nature of digital photography. Douglas Gantenbien makes many statments in this article that I often feel reverberate within me when I am contemplating the struggle between film and digital photography. I think Douglas said it all when he stated "...Film was magic -- the process of pushing a button to open the shutter, forming an invisible image on a strip of coated plastic, then making that image visible by bathing it with chemicals and projecting it onto a sheet of paper that in turn was soaked in more chemicals and sometimes rubbed and massaged to manipulate the image." This is exactly how I feel about the art and beauty that film photography creates. He also makes a very valid statement that some of the most amazing pictures have been created by the human error that film photography allows. Some mistakes or miscalculations in photography have created award winning pictures. Now with this new digital age there is no room for mistakes and those once amazing "by chance" shots will be extinct.
The part of this article that really struck me was the sentimentality and emotion that is attached to film photography. The opening of this article talks about a man who becomes misty eyed when talking about his very first 35mm camera. I may just be cynical, but I find it hard to believe that any person is sentimentally attached to thier kokak point and shoot digital camera. Within this examination Douglas made one more statment that I believe should be passed on to our younger generation about the loss and extinction of a beautiful art. Douglas "...sees digital photography as a disaster for historians. People delete pictures from their cameras' memory cards. Hard drives crash. PCs end up in the dump, photos still on board. And CDs full of pictures will become unreadable when their surfaces deteriorate (you heard that right -- CDs are incredibly unstable). With all that, says Mr. Federman, we're on the verge of losing billions of pictures. We will not have a record of the individual stories that are told by families from one generation to another through pictures.That is a wealth of human history that will simply be lost."

Amen.

"Film Photography Fades To Black" by Douglas Gantenbien, The Wall Street Journal
March 14, 2006