That’s the title of a story by Peter Plagens that appeared in Newsweek Magazine on December 10, 2007.  A photographer sent me a photocopy of the article years ago, and for some reason I never read it until now. While written almost seventeen years ago, the situation really hasn’t changed all that much… except perhaps for one thing. It’s such a good piece and still so relevant that I would like to quote some of what the author said.

“Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera.  A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we’ve witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers – into conjurers of fiction. It’s hard to say “gee whiz” anymore.

…. We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corporeal reality. … Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn’t it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer’s attention as “evidence” rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from an artist’s imagination, except that they lack paintings concocted entirely they lack painting’s manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, “Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.” She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers – if there are to be any – will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s special link to reality. And they’ll have to do it in a brand new way.”

So is there a “new way” to “reclaim photography’s special link to reality”?  I think there is. Essentially, an old way that’s “new”. And what is that? Why it’s the growing popularity of film and use of film cameras, old and new. Will film ever replace digital? I don’t think so, certainly not for commercial color work. But as I’ve discussed elsewhere, use of film has been growing, especially with young people. In some way’s this development is not dissimilar to what has happened with the resurgence of vinyl LPs and the demise of CDs. Vinyl had to be nearly on the brink of extinction before people realized what they were going to be losing. And I think the same thing has happened with film and darkroom processes and materials.

It’s like Joni Mitchell once sang “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”?  In the case of analog photography, it was almost gone, but we knew what we got … and thankfully it’s now not gone! Yes, so let’s all go out and “reclaim photography’s special link to reality” and make some work worth making!

Stay well,

Michael