Over the last couple of weeks I have had a chance to revisit some old friends. These friends are my own pictures... images taken on film in the 70's and 80's on 35mm, 120 and 4 x 5 film. I have been meaning to catalog my film negs for some time now by photographing them in their polyethylene negative sleeves with a digital camera and then processing them to give me digital contact sheets. The process works really well, with a Nikon D800 giving me more than enough resolution to be able to preview the images larger than was possible in the past using a loupe pressed against a printed contact sheet. I have approximately 1500 contact sheets which were taken over a 10 year period and the more I looked at them, the more I could not look away.
This is a history of my picture making life, beginning in 1975 when I bought my first Pentax Spotmatic and began taking pictures. Yes, among the negatives are images from 1975, such a long time ago, and now they have come back to life, in ways I could never have imagined. The ability to look at these images greatly enlarged on a computer monitor has made them much more real and accessible than they ever were before. In a sense I am seeing the work for the first time, after so many years. With time, distance and the perspective that experience brings, I can certainly see my own work differently and I am pleasantly surprised.
Taking the process a step further, I began scanning some of these negatives with an Epson V600 flatbed scanner and was amazed at the detail I could extract from the negs. With this encouragement, I found other medium and large format negatives that I was able to resurrect, digitally process in Photoshop and print to a quality level that is very comparable to the silver gelatin prints I made back when that was the only option. Never content... it felt as though the negatives should be yielding more detail than I was getting. After doing so research on the net, I found that photographing the negatives with a macro lens on a DSLR was better than the scanner. Since I have the D800, I thought why not.
With a very meager and let's say a flimsy set up, I have been able to extract detail from my medium and large format negatives that are very impressive. Using a 105mm macro and the D800 I am able to photograph the negs at 1:1 magnification and with the resolution of the D800 capture the film grain with no problem. (I still need to do a comparison test with an Imacon film scanner). I am very pleased with the quality of this process.
However this is not the real story.
As I began to work with the negatives and to look back at almost 40 years of picture making, some ideas have dawned on me that are both very comforting, but also very disturbing.
A bit of background... back in the day when I was taking pictures with film, I was fairly meticulous about storing the negs in archival sleeves and keeping them in binders according to year. I accumulated a couple of cardboard bankers boxes of binders which over the next decades I hauled around from place to place as I moved, not really paying much attention to them except that I knew where they were and with no intention of ever letting them go. I last had a darkroom in 1990 and have not really looked at these negatives until now.
As I hold these images frozen in silver in my hands, as I am able to see and touch the film acetate and see the negative image there, I cannot help but wonder... if in this age of "digital" image making, my digital images would have survived intact, with no alteration or attention (indeed, neglect), for over 20 years as these film negatives have. The disturbing thought is that they likely would not without some regular intervention on my part to copy the digital data from format to format (i.e floppy disks, syquest cartridges, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray to multiple hard drives, not to mention keeping up with the computer operating systems). The comfort to me is that the film negatives are still here, as rich and vibrant as ever… and now able to be interpreted through digital means. Then there is the nostalgia, and since I am now over 60… I will allow myself that indulgence. As I look at the film negatives again I remember what it was like to take pictures with a 4 x 5 Nagoaka folding rosewood camera, in itself a work of art. Making pictures this way was a ritual, a contemplative, meditative ritual that fed my soul as I made them. Because of the process of using a 4 x5 camera, you do not take pictures lightly as it is a deliberate act just to set up the camera. And yet… and yet…. this is part of the magic and the wonder that is recording light. I suspect now that I may have lost my way and become somewhat enticed by the technology of digital at the expense of craft and seeing. In some ways digital feels like fast food, but I do realize that it is just a tool and the image is all that matters, no matter how it is made. However there is something to be said for "less is more", for a more deliberate and thoughtful approach that requires a greater sense of awareness. In many ways that is also what I miss, not just the tangible physical aspect of a film negative but the whole process. I now have a sense that I want to go back… not completely as digital is also in my blood, but I do want to slow down and see again through a 4 x 5 ground glass to compose the image, slide the film holder in, remove the dark slide and take a few minutes to meter the contrast ratio of the scene to decide on the proper exposure, and then with cable release in my hand... trip the shutter. I’d like my camera to be handcrafted in wood, as simple as simple can be, a dark box with a lens at one end and fresh film at the other.
Digital image making is indeed incredible, but it is so ephemeral, so transient that at times I wonder if it is real at all. Do not think that I am abandoning digital, far from it, I will use both and indeed there are aspects of image making that are truly just not possible with film, and as an expert with digital imaging tools I do know this to be true. However, I feel the call back to film and will heed that call.
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