Midnight Media Cafe - Kodachrome
Sunday, June 28th, 2009 01:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serai.
*sniffle*
Kodachrome - Paul Simon
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all...
I was so saddened to hear of the demise of Kodachrome. It was the film I learned to take pictures on, in a class on photography at Hollywood High School, back in the 70's. The class was taught by the most endearingly sweet, formal old German gentleman, a consummate photography lover, who taught the class not for the low fee, but because he felt he had to pass on what he knew. Which was a LOT.
All of which is now obselete, and that makes me sadder than you can know. I especially remember learning about the mystery of solarization, in which the photographer risked the existence of an image in order to achieve a particular artistic effect. That mysterious risk, that charge of adrenaline when you printed the photo and for the first time saw what happened when you were in the darkroom - that is completely impossible now. Digital media has destroyed that sense of risk in creating images, because no photo is ever at risk anymore. Once it exists in your camera (unless you're clumsy enough to delete it), the image can be copied onto any number of media, and manipulating it is safe as houses, since you're always working on a copy.
It may not seem like much to someone who's never done it, but those hours in the temple of the darkroom, slowly creating art, physical art, that you had to build with paper and chemicals and cut mattes and the right kind of light, had an extraordinary magic for me. So much so that, although I've had times when I had the money to buy a good digital camera, I just can't do it. It feels like cheating, like a pale neurasthenic cousin of photography, all convenience and no sweat, no sacrifice, no immersion, no mystery. No art. I know it's considered a form of art now, but for me it lacks something, and that something is the end process - creating the photo itself, beyond the image. Pressing "print" just doesn't cut it for me.
*sigh* Goodbye, old teacher. Your greens of summers taught me so much.
R.I.P.
*sniffle*
Kodachrome - Paul Simon
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all...
I was so saddened to hear of the demise of Kodachrome. It was the film I learned to take pictures on, in a class on photography at Hollywood High School, back in the 70's. The class was taught by the most endearingly sweet, formal old German gentleman, a consummate photography lover, who taught the class not for the low fee, but because he felt he had to pass on what he knew. Which was a LOT.
All of which is now obselete, and that makes me sadder than you can know. I especially remember learning about the mystery of solarization, in which the photographer risked the existence of an image in order to achieve a particular artistic effect. That mysterious risk, that charge of adrenaline when you printed the photo and for the first time saw what happened when you were in the darkroom - that is completely impossible now. Digital media has destroyed that sense of risk in creating images, because no photo is ever at risk anymore. Once it exists in your camera (unless you're clumsy enough to delete it), the image can be copied onto any number of media, and manipulating it is safe as houses, since you're always working on a copy.
It may not seem like much to someone who's never done it, but those hours in the temple of the darkroom, slowly creating art, physical art, that you had to build with paper and chemicals and cut mattes and the right kind of light, had an extraordinary magic for me. So much so that, although I've had times when I had the money to buy a good digital camera, I just can't do it. It feels like cheating, like a pale neurasthenic cousin of photography, all convenience and no sweat, no sacrifice, no immersion, no mystery. No art. I know it's considered a form of art now, but for me it lacks something, and that something is the end process - creating the photo itself, beyond the image. Pressing "print" just doesn't cut it for me.
*sigh* Goodbye, old teacher. Your greens of summers taught me so much.
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no subject
Date: Sunday, June 28th, 2009 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 03:17 am (UTC)(would you believe Jerry Uelsmann was one of the professors, I didn't get him as a teacher of course I was a lowly undergrad but I remember going to his lecture and being mesmerized.