I’m going back to film. I’ll still shoot digital, but I like the look of film images; they are softer, and seem to capture reality more truthfully than digital images. Which is puzzling, because digital cameras take much sharper images. But the softer focus, the dust, the scratches, the unpredictable interaction between light, old glass, shutter speed, aperture, film speed, camera shake, the film developing process, and all of the conditions around one–when one is trying to make a photograph with an old manual camera–all of these things give the film photograph a sense of reality that digital cameras can’t provide.
The viewer of a film photograph instantly knows, mostly on an unconscious level, that the photo before him really happened. He can imagine, briefly, the circumstances that may have occurred when the picture was taken. The imperfections in the image convey information which the mind uses to reconstruct the event captured.
And, therefore, film photographs help you extrapolate from those circumstances to a wider scope of circumstances. Take the photograph of my sister, for example. A healthy, happy 13- or 14-year old girl. Well fed, well groomed, well cared for. Living in a beautiful, well-constructed home, in a nice neighbourhood. Lots of tree-lined streets and boulevards; single-parent families with lots of children everywhere. An economy that supported a fairly stress-free existence. People were well-mannered and polite, and kind. They attended religious services and cultural events and visited each other.
Every decade since then has seen a decline in all of those qualities of living.
Even the means of making photographs has declined. Used to be you would need cameras and film and darkrooms; chemicals and people who would sell this equipment and explain how to use it.
Nowadays, all of that is gone. Most people have a tiny electronic camera built into their telephone and that’s it. And the cell phone of today is a poor substitute for the large, comfortable, analog telephones of yesteryear. The sound quality of those phones was superior to today’s cell phones. The fact they were attached to walls meant you had to have a room with a chair and a table to sit near when you placed or received a call; you would sit down and have a real conversation with another person.
These days you’re lucky if you get a text from an AI. We’ve all been placed in cages in the sky, working for a heartless computer god who will incinerate our remains when we’re gone and dispose of our possessions–all of them digital–in the bit bucket when we die.
Wow, that got dark quickly.