Date posted: October 11, 2007 - Thursday
Title: A dying art
Current mood: sad
I noted a sad passing in the newspaper the other day. It wasn't the final death knell, but I think you can see the end from here.
And most people won't even care.
What was the portent of the end? A chain of grocery stores stopped offering developing and prints for roll film.
The article said the sales of rolls of film have been going down by 25 to 30 percent a year for the last four years. The peak for film sales was 1999 when 800 millions rolls were sold. In 2006 there were only 204 million rolls of film sold.
The Stop and Shop chain stopped film processing in all 300 stores in the Northeast on September 15. And they are not the first chain to discontinue the service. And they won't be the last, I am sure.
Sales of the disposable, single-use cameras is declining as well.
Everything is digital now. And it actually means an increase in the number of photographs taken each year. At the height of the film camera it is estimated 25 billion images were taken and printed each year. By 2009 it is estimated 135 billion images will be taken, but far fewer will be printed. Most of these images will reside on a computer somewhere. And what can be called the art of photography will die as well.
And why do I morn the passage of film?
Because I spent a lot of time in the darkroom years ago. Yep, I'm a dinosaur when it comes to photography as well. I stained a lot of shirts and pants and my fingers in darkrooms over the years. And I produced some pretty good work; or at least I thought it was good. But, like a lot of things in my life, I never put in the time or the dedication to get as good as I could have been.
Still, one of the things I have dreamed about was the day I could possibly have my own darkroom. There was a time when all I wanted to do was take pictures all day and spend all night developing and printing them.
But no one works in black and white anymore. Very few do their own darkroom work anymore; even in color. And, apparently, very few people want to work with roll film at all.
I guess it will all fade away. And we will lose an art form. Yes, there is an art to working in the darkroom and making your own prints. There are happy accidents which occur that cannot happen when you work digital and play with pixels. And I may be wrong, but I suspect you can't get the same results in a digital media that you could when you had to get your hands wet with a print.
And we will lose our appreciation for people like Alfred Eisenstadt and Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. No one wants to haul an 8x10 view camera into Yellowstone Park anymore.
