“From today painting
is dead”, is an alleged quote by the French nineteenth century realist painter
Paul Delaroche, after seeing the first daguerreotype photographic process,
which was invented in France, 1839. One might now be more likely to state that
today photographic film is dead, with the paradigm shift from traditional negative/positive
film processing, into the digital age of one hour printing services, and home digital
darkroom image manipulation and printing. Likewise you also could state that
printed photographs are dead, due to the accessibility today of flat screen devices
and online image sharing, what is the point of physical prints?
The good news is painting did not die with the invention of
photography, instead photography helped painting make it’s quantum leap to what
we consider painting to be today.
Likewise cinema has not killed off the popularity of the going to the
theatre, no matter how advanced CGI and other special effects become, they cannot
replace the experience of a real life performance. Using analogue film cameras
has now become an alternative process to mainstream digital photography, but do
we still reminisce the days of using film, of even miss those days?
The growing popularity of phone apps like Instagram and the Lomography
movement, one might be more likely to get a Polaroid camera rather than digital,
this Christmas (I hope). Obviously the cost of film has been a big factor in
the past, compared to the very low costs of digital photography today; the hobby
is now vastly more accessible to everybody. Although for me digital photography
might seem far more advanced compared to analogue, but some of that apprehension
and magic which traditional photography created has been lost. The excitement of checking the film strip
straight after processing, or getting your hands on a fresh set of prints, half
forgetting what you have recorded. You might get twenty four duds but those
three gems were worth it.
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