Traditional Darkroom, A Dying Art?

[RICHRRD ILOMAKI]

RAven:

When photography was developed in the mid 19th century, many bemoaned the End OF Painting. Yet to come were Picasso, Dali, Monet, Matisse, Miro, and (even) Pollock and Rothko.

I too look foward with relish to the ability to make B&W prints ( my particular preferred output medium) on a Printer via computer as wellas in messy trays of chemicals in teh dark. I have the computer under my fingers as I type this. Beside me I have a Canon BJC 6000, printer which can make OK colour prints, some of which I have displayed and people have payed for. Within a month I will likely get an Epson 2000 with the aftermarket inks for monochrome prints.

I have also just acquired an old Agfa Ansco 8x10 and am awestruck by the quality of the contact prints on silver paper. I also have made a light source and labouriously squeezed out a few Pt/Pd prints and will continue with both of these.

Where is the rule that says I can't do all three? Yes, the materials may become scarce, but there will always be supplies of film & paper, just as there are suppliers of brushes, oils, pastel crayons and canvas. There are still companies that make glass tubes( valves) for Hi Fi amplifiers, as well as those black plastic discs with needles scratching in grooves, which still reproduce beautiful music..

Wake up. The future was here yesterday.

Cheers

[Ellis Vener]

It isn't an either/or, binary choice. What you will see more and more in the present and the near future is a hybrid. Especially with large format. You'll shoot on film, and then have your best image scanned and you print via photoshop. Some people, like Dan Burkholder are taking it a step further, and instead of printing to paper , are using their digital files to output enlarged negatives and using those to make large platinum/palladium prints. The hard won skills of printing will carry over, just with a new set of tools. True Photography is about vision, not Dektol.

[James Phillips]

Hi Raven,

Just couldn't resist answering this one. Have you ever added something to your computer such as a "Palm Pilot" or perhaps a new driver ? Has it ever screwed up your system and required 6 to 10 hours to just get things back to the way they were ? Ever have a virus attack your PC and erase your hard drive or just play havock with the computer ? Do you run a personal firewall to protect yourself from others who want to steal your secrets ? (or perhaps your digital photos)

Ever have a presentation document or large spreadsheet just about perfect and then with a simple additional keystroke completely destroy the result and find yourself unable to get back to where you want to be ?

Like others before me, I also am a woodworker and know that particleboard is a temporary solution and very fustrating to work with when you want to acheive a high quality and lasting result. Give me "REAL" wood and I'm as happy as a "pig in #$@%$". I also happen to be employed in the computer industry (18 years) and can hardily wait till I can retire and never have to fix, update, re-install, adjust, or just plain kick another computer again.

So to everybody out there I say ...welcome to the digital photographic age ! I hope you enjoy your many rebuilds to come ! As for me I'm delighted with real film, real paper, and a real darkroom. Have yet to have to reload, re-install or re-configure any of these since I first began using them.

My analog best to all,

GreyWolf

[Bill Smith]

There is only one truth here. DIGITAL OR NOTHING!

[james mickelson]

For the foreseeable future photography as it is now will be around. Paper will still be around. Witness Berger Papers. Many films will be available too. Witness all the eastern european materials. Not every country has access to the digital revolution that the US and western europe does. When everyone in the west has gone to digital the Chinese will start producing paper and film because many there who practice photography will be in the wetroom because computers aren't readily available or prohibitively expensive. But to those who dismiss the digital revolution, as not real photography or are afraid of the coming revolution, I say too bad for you. It will be a marvelous art form akin to the birth of photography. It is in it's infancy now. It will get even better and easier to use. And it is much more environmentally safe. For the environmental cost of a computer system you get millions of images. No pulp bleaching and bartya materials. No more silver solvents. No more toning byproducts. No more wastefull washing of prints. You will be able to do so much more with your creative vision. Velvia? Passe now. A moderately skilled high school student using photoshop can color rings around my favorite film. Quit the arguing. You like the wetroom like me so be it. That's cool. If you are into digital, well good for you. Neither of you campers have anything on the other. Just do what you do best and enjoy it. Make images not war. There's no need to champion your chosen methodologies. Just make images. Quit trying to be better than the other guy. Just make images. James

[George Nedleman]

I don't know how much I can add to this thread,but here goes. Yesterday I took a 1 day course given by West Coast Imaging on scanning and manipulating the image in Photoshop. I was astounded by the quality of the many finished prints on display. Mostly color but one large Pieziography (sp?)B&Wprint.Thetonal values on the BW print were spectacular. I have spent many hours on this type of negative, breaking waves against almost black rocks on the pacific coast. There was an Ilfochrome print and a matched print from the scanned chrome. There was no comparison! The scanned light jet print was sharper,the highlights detailed, the shadows textured,and midtones subtle. It does cost though. I think in a few years,as we have seen, the quality of equipment will increase markedly and the price will drop. Digital is here to stay. The person sitting next to me is a professional who is using his digital Canon exclusively for his architectural work. He described an interior office shot he had just done theat sounded, to me, like a nightmare-outdoor light through windows, bounced Fluorescent ceiling lights and halogens elsewhere. The Canon handled it all and photoshop balanced out all the lighting extremes. George

[Michael Kadillak]

I tend to look at this situation as not necessarily a fork in the road that needs to be taken, but a very general trend in society driven by a perceived need to increase business efficiencies for which photography is simply attached to the wagon. I personally believe that given the infrastructural cost and the results produced, the numbers have shown that digital has quickly grown to its current size and additional market growth is nominal at best projected forward. It is a large niche market not an upward growth trend. Why it has drawn so much attention (and concern) is because conventional photography has been a nominal growth industry at best for decades. As result, the only way for companies to grow in this environment is to take market share away from a competitor. That is what is happening in the battle of Fuji versus Kodak in the color print markets. Conversely, digital has been a July 4th fireworks display from purely a business perspective. Once this market peaks out, which it will, the technological growth component that everyone expects will continue will also reach its pinnacle because of the fact that the financial supporters of this product are the first to injest the realities of nominal market growth projections. Without an expectation that additional growth will take place, costs will stay high and business players will go elsewhere with their intelligence and capital. Those are the realities of todays high expectation financial and business world. The botton line is that a product cycle of 8-10 years is reasonable for digital photography. As a result, it is highly probable these two products can cohabitate perfectly well for years to come in photography. The largest risk in photography I feel is for a large player to drop out through market share consolidation. Is it possible for Fuji to acquire Kodak? Before you say NO WAY, who would have thought it possible that small Dynegy would be able to acquire the huge Enron given the fact that Dynegy is 1/5 the size of Enron. It gives me goose bumps to think that Tri-X could come in anything other than a black and yellow box, but as long as it comes, who cares?

Lastly, I just wanted to personally thank everyone for the great deals to be had as they make the move to digital. I hope that whatever medium you chose you find considerable satisfaction in the expressive arts.

[Jonathan Brewer]

The truth here is that pride in workmanship and quality are always going to mean something. 10 years ago they were predicting the end of Photography. Photography isn't going to disappear, it's just going to be practiced now by the people who love it.

The new toys for the well to do 'yuppies' and rich folks will be in the digital arena until they get tired of them and then they will be for sale.

I will never accept paying good money for things that aren't made to last. The same people who 'sweetalked' you into paying $5000.00 for their scanner five years ago, will sell you one today with the same features for $500.00.

Digitals gonna be great, and it's going to be cheap. Save your money and wait, unless it's burning a hole in your pocket.

[David R Munson]

I think that, at very least, as long as there are people who value the art and process of traditional photographic processes, there will be film, paper, and chemistry. Look at what?s keeping products like Azo alive now- the people who love the stuff and use it because they feel it is the best. This is why there are still people doing Daguerreotypes and salted paper negatives. True, given 50 years, there might be fewer people out there doing large format photography using traditional materials, but they will still be there. I don?t know about the rest of you, but I don?t necessarily drag 50 pounds of wood, metal, and glass around the hillside because I think it?s fun. I do it because it?s a method and process I love and believe in. To quote Robert Adams, and please forgive me for any typos:

One does not for long wrestle a view camera in the wind and heat and cold just to illustrate a philosophy. The thing that keeps you scrambling over rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.

To me, the same sort of idea applies to the materials we use. We use what we use because it?s what we feel is the best for what we do. If some new, ultra-affordable digital process came along that was superior in every way to any traditional photographic process ever devised, I?m betting every one of you would give it some serious thought. But would we all jump on the bandwagon and leave our film to collect dust? I think not. Modern color processes pretty much put an end to the practical application of processes like the autochrome, and yet there are still a few people out there keeping it alive and having one hell of a good time doing it.

I find myself in a bit of a unique generational situation. I was born in 1982, and that places me in the gray area between gen. X?ers and whatever they?re calling what?s after that. My generation has a lot in common with the X?ers in that unlike those a few years younger than me, we remember when Challenger exploded, we remember when the first Nintendo came out, and computers have not always been a part of our lives. I?m comfortable using computers, even for photographic applications, but it?s not my favorite way of doing things. Last week I spent 3 hours in PhotoShop editing wires, antennas, and a stop light out of a photo of a building of Athens City Hall. On the other hand, yesterday I spent 3 hours making contact prints of 8x10 pyro negatives using Azo and ansco 130. For me, digital and traditional photography do not necessarily have to be antitheses to each other. The photographers of my generation are in a situation where we need to be proficient at both digital and traditional mediums right off the bat. I work on my independent study project in architectural photography during the week in which I use a 4x5 monorail, wooden film holders, and Provia. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I go to my desktop publishing class where I work on stuff in Photoshop, GoLive, Quark, and sometimes Freehand. I am already working hard to know and be able to use both kinds of tools to the best of my ability. For the next generation of photographers, though, I wonder how much traditional technology will be in the mix. My nine year old cousin was born in 1992, exactly ten years after me to the day. His house has had a computer in it since the day he was born- they aren?t a new concept that he had to adapt to and learn like the rest of us did. Even I am at a bit of an advantage in that regard in that a good 2/3rds of my life had computers in it. But for those photographers who come along in another 10 years, what percentage of them will have more of a background in film than in digital?

In terms of the digital divide, I think we also have to consider the world situation in terms of industry and the like before we can start doing last rights for film. The core nations of the world-that is, those with the most lucrative economies and post-industrial social structures-are getting to the point where, yes, film is becoming more threatened by digital. Look at those countries of the world in the periphery and semi-periphery, though. My sister was until very recently in the Peace Corps in a town outside Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. This town had one telephone and only very sporadically had electricity available. Do you really think that people there or in any developing part of the world are so worried about digital technology overtaking film? Not only do I think that film will be kept alive and available by those who prefer traditional processes, I think that film and such will be kept alive worldwide by simple demand. Until the rest of the world ?catches up? to where we are as a nation, and then everybody takes one giant step into the future, film is safe in my book.

I think I had better quit now. The continued availability of film, paper, and chemicals is a very complex and relatively volatile issue. It?ll be interesting to see where things go in the next few years.

[Mako]

As painting has coexisted, largely peacefully, next to photography, so do I hope will be the fate of digital imaging with silver photography.

Granted, it was commercial considerations (cheaper, faster, the quest for new market niches, etc) that gave birth to digital imaging and availability of cheaper hardware ment that more and more people could afford it. The truth is that most people with a camera in their hands just want to take snaps and to hell with technique. I'll go by it.

The real problem I see is the trend to compare just the end product of the two disciplines, i.e. the print. But how can they ever be the same? The silver photographer has to master technique first before he can use it to express his vision. He spends hours in the field waiting for the correct light before tripping the shutter. In the darkroom he can spend many hours even days for an evocative print.

In contrast the digital imager may not even have to have a camera. And technique? Well Photoshop can be used to correct the contrast, balance the tones and add extraneous elements. Granted, the last has been used by silver photographers but it requires extraordinary skill.

Silver photography produces unique images just like any craftsman cannot produce identical products from the same draft. The love of the artist for his image grows with the time he spends seeing it come into being.

Digital imaging is an automated way of cloning the same image in increasingly good quality and speed. Love? No _time_ for that.

Therefore it is only fair towards the artist who created an image to clearly state if it is unmanipulated silver or digital. Unmanipulated silver is a contradiction of terms!

In one way the digital imaging can be seen as a blessing. It has separated the silver photographers from the rest. We are a much smaller group now but we do what we do out of choice. As long as we keep buying films and papers they will continue to exist. As simple as that :-)