A November 24th economist.com blog entry concerning the photographer Anton Corbijn stated, “PHOTOGRAPHY as a slow, analogue art-form is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute—that’s six billion each month—and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital products anyone can be a Photoshop hack, selfie whore or filter junkie. We see with our smartphones, not our eyes. What need do we have for old-fashioned specialists using toxic chemicals to make a physical print that can be neither insta-shared nor “liked”?”

Recently I heard somewhere that over 3 billion photographs are being made each day. That’s right – 3 BILLION! Very few of these are being printed. So when displayed, they appear mainly on the Internet via the various photo sharing sites. As indicated above, the vast majority are most certainly digitally based. I think that’s fine, but how do you rise above the overwhelming quantity to create something special and truly meaningful to you?

Well, I believe more and more people are going back to film based photography, and to a lesser extent, getting back into the darkroom. Things will never be what they were 15 or 20 years ago, but again who would have thought vinyl LPs would make such a comeback (Not surprisingly, I never left vinyl and don’t own a CD player!). People are longing to create something that is really tangible, the results of a linear and creative process that can be held in one’s hands, vs. something viewed in a fleeting moment on an electronic device.

There can be no doubt that there is a tactile pleasure and emotional experience when holding a black and white print you made, mounted and matted, that cannot be duplicated when viewing something on your computer screen, tablet or phone.

I think you may know this is true. Yes, there is no hiding, no excuses, and it takes much more effort and more thought — but so does anything that is truly worthwhile in life!

Think about it…It’s the picture you first envisioned in your mind’s eye and exposed on film; the developed negative resulted in a print you labored to make as best as you could to recreate your original vision, then you finally viewed and ultimately held in your hands the results of your finished work. That is satisfying, and even more so if you take that print and put it on a wall somewhere.

In her wonderful essay “Photography Is My Passion,” Nancy Newhall eloquently expressed in greater detail what I am trying to say. It makes as much sense today as when she wrote it over 40 years ago:

“ There is always, eventually, the ‘moment of truth.’ Your straight photographer faces his ‘moment of truth’ constantly; there is nothing to hedge behind. There is only himself, a flexible instrument called a camera, with changes of lenses, filters, and films; and reality. And he usually has less than an instant to work in. The terrible pull of world events can indeed kill the journalist, blow him up or imprison him, but the average dedicated photographer just tries to face his environment, to face up to what he or she is or is not. Or what the environment is or is not.

There are two other ‘moments of truth’ in photography: first, when you examine your developed negative. Did you think it through? Have you what you hoped to have? Have you yet the discipline and the compassion and the insight? Stieglitz said, ‘When I make a photograph, I make love.’ And that is true. But if you don’t know enough to get your love into the negative, you will not have the next magic ‘moment’ – when you see your image coming up as a print in the developer. And that is magic. Then you set to work to see how much more revealing you can make your print. Adam, the old musician, says, ‘The negative is the score. The print is the performance.’”

There is no doubt that these moments of truth can be frightening, but to the dedicated and curious, they are worth the fear!