During a recent exhibition opening my co-exhibitors and I were asked if film was dying. In a knee-jerk response I quickly blurted out that it was already dead. I couldn’t believe those words had leaped out of my mouth. That very morning I had shot film, and that afternoon I had taken images shot digitally and went to great lengths to turn them into negatives resembling film so that I could print them with palladium.
Well, my mutterings launched some serious debate and for the next half-hour my comments were exposed. The question and the debate it sparkede has kept me pondering the topic these many weeks later.
Of my colleagues in attendance at this exhibition, there was only one who has jumped into digital without looking back, Andy Snow. Andy is a commercial photographer (www.andysnow.com) by profession and shooting digital makes sense, film does not. His prints are beautiful.
Of the other three photographers, they represent academia and fine-art photographers with a wide variety of photographic visions. Ben Montague (www.benjaminmontague.com), who laughingly muses as to whether he is actually a photographer anymore because his is imagery often bypasses the camera altogether and emanates from a scanner or an enlarger. Ok, maybe it is not film but it definitely honors the roots of our medium.
David Stichweh, a kindred spirit, uses a digital camera and printer in only the initial stage in creating stunning imagery that is definitely grounded in traditional photography.
And then there is Sean Wilkinson who has only recently ventured into digital photography. I am interested in seeing where digital takes him because Sean is one of the most intelligent photographers that I have ever met and his photographs reflect that measured vision.
So it would seem that I was the only one actually still shooting film, how ironic. But what is evident is that few photographers are using film and photography in the linear way it once was used. There are few photographic artists merely going from film to print, how blasé. Again, I still do. But mostly the adventure has begun – digital and film are being pushed in ways that question what is new, what is old, what is photography. Influences from photography’s beginnings are being turned and twisted into new elements. Film–digital–who cares. All that matters is the end result.
paula Uncategorized Photography as Art
