What's been gained in the analog age?

[paulr]

There's another thread about what has been lost as digital tools become more mainstream in photography.

I thought it would be interesting to consider a perspective that gets ignored most of the time: in what ways have people using analog materials been liberated, or encouraged to work in new and interesting ways?

There's such an obvious parallel with the early days of photography, when the new medium started disenfranchising painters and illustrators whose trade was realistic depiction.

People were quick to announce the death of painting, but the only thing that died (or downsized) was mimetic painting. Photography turned out to be one of the forces spurring painters into the world of abstraction and expressionism—tasks it was better suited for than the new medium, whose ties to the physical world were both a strength and a limitation.

My friend Anne McDonald provides one example. She's moved from traditional photography to wild an unpredictable mural making technique, that employs elements of photogram, light painting, and selective development, bleaching, and toning. She works with out-of-date mural paper and with chemicals from the darkroom, the kitchen, and the medicine cabinet. Her method requires a kind of improvised dialog with the materials that is entirely dependent on their chemical nature.

In the 1990s there was an artist in the Denver Salon who made murals by covering his body in developer and lying on exposed mural paper (hey kids: not recommended).

Does anyone know of other examples? What can you do with analog tools/ materials that's fundamental different from what you can do with digital ones? What discoveries have been made in the last 15 years?

[Steve Smith]

I don't know about gained but people have forgotten how to spell analogue!


Steve.

[Vaughn]

Hybrid processes. The possibility to print enlarged digital negatives via inkjet printers (from digital capture or scanned negs) has opened up alternative photographic processes to many people.

[John Kasaian]

My 8x10 Elwood enlarger warms tortillas like gangbusters. One tortilla in fact appears to have a profile identical to Edward Weston.

[Peter York]

Really good film scanners

[paulr]

analog |ˈanlˌôg; -ˌäg| (also analogue)
noun
a person or thing seen as comparable to another : the idea that the fertilized egg contains a miniature analog of every adult structure.
• Chemistry a compound with a molecular structure closely similar to that of another.
adjective
relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position or voltage. Often contrasted with digital (sense 1).
• (of a clock or watch) showing the time by means of hands rather than displayed digits.

(Oxford Dictionary of American English)

[paulr]

My 8x10 Elwood enlarger warms tortillas like gangbusters. One tortilla in fact appears to have a profile identical to Edward Weston.

I'd pay even more for a Weston Tortilla than for Jesus toast.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Does anyone know of other examples? What can you do with analog tools/ materials that's fundamental different from what you can do with digital ones?

Speaking only for myself, one who still prints in the darkroom, analog requires patience and making the picture as right as one can in-camera. This means that a person edits within the reality of the situation, with constant feedback from experience, good and bad and even accidental outcomes. There is no opportunity to fake light, perspective, 'being there'. It is just that simple, and simple is good.

What discoveries have been made in the last 15 years?

Only that 15 years ago I was 52 years-old. All I've discovered all my life is living in an expanding awareness of my own ignorance.

[Leszek Vogt]

Lots of different approaches. Friend of mine even used Marshall oils. But, my Microslouch thesaurus have issues with "analog" - no comprente. Strange, the painters get to watch the erosion of analog photography....or I should say materials available to photographers. Some people consider phone pixing as photography. After 40 yrs of being away from it, I still don't miss the nasty smell of the chemicals....have to force myself to do the 5x7 negs or they will not be done as I need them.

Les

[Jac@stafford.net]

No one here has ever loaded an analog into a sheet film holder.

Do you not mean 'Analogy' rather than analog?