Film, Texture & Degradation
BA Dissertation
2022
A modern camera today can be up to 100mp, capturing images from over half a mile away. With this typeof focal range it digital lapses any pre cursing camera. Unlike digital film has no megapixel, and onlycaptures at most what one sees with the naked eye. Film is a derelict format. The process can be creativelyrisky and development is long. Digital is initially pricey but the price is a one-off. Film costs need not beexpensive but are financially costly in the long run. Digital 's intent starts a digital process and ends in one.Film is founded in chemical/ physical processes and due to the modern era will most likely end with a digitalproduct. Film for some is primarily bought with full intention of making a digital asset. Wouldn t digital thecontemporary counterpart be more practical? It seems that film continues to be a trendy and alluring productaround those that practice or are adjacent the photographic arts. Color theory is often brought up but digitalhas just as wide and a more maleable frame work. You can edit digitally captured photography far morethen then film. In such you can atain any look or aesthetic you desire. What is modern digital photographymissing that has people enthralled in the bygone era of film photography?
CHAPTER I: THE EVERYDAY ANALOGUE
Film Used in Contrast toFilm while not many people's first choice, may be chosen as an opposition due to other societalfactors. Film is the most efficient way of getting a physical copy. The continued prevalence of instant filmis probably for this exact reason. Skipping the annoying aspects of development on receives quick one-offs that develop themselves and become their most authentic state of an image. Film doesn t need to be afinancial investment in the same manner digital does. Film rolls and cameras can be found for both cheapand expensive prices, allowing for film to be less expensive in the short term. Even the normal expensivefilm camera is not as expensive as its digital counterpart. With the barriers to entry far lower, this allows fordisposable, instant film, and Polaroids to become fashionable cultural staples. As technology progresses,the standards of digital imagery will only increase, pushing for expensive and less consumer-friendly tech.Film might just be a very consumer-friendly, aesthetic with a consumer-friendly product. Practicing withfilm pushes one to be more diligent, invested, and immersed in the image. In Should I Buy a film camerain 2021, Tech radar journalist, Jason Parnell-Brookes navigates why film continues to spur enthusiasm andonline movements, such as #Filmisnotdead. "There seems to be something about the tactile engagement offilm cameras that photographers crave, which is no surprise when the rest of the world is largely poweredby swipes and impersonal video chats. In an age of instant gratification, we have developed the habit of"chimping" (checking photos on the back screen as soon as we ve taken the shot) with our digital cameras,and this takes us out of the moment. Shoot film, though, and there is no image review, so we must engagewith our subject and surroundings. 'In an age dominated iPhone, bulky DSLRs, and screens, it's nice to havesomething not as screen-based. It is a constant conversation on how these 'screens affect us and the securityrisk that comes with them.When health and academic organizations, report prolonged use of technology has negative sideeffects, it's only practical that we find alternatives to these options. We live with screens every day of ourlives. Organization National Institute of Health and Oxford Academic has clarified that these affect ourdaily lives, to the point that the negative implications are a part of the public conscience. Prolonged use inchildren is said to stifle learning and development. In adults and adolescents, it impacts sleep, mental healthFilm and analogue are an escape from this screen-based reality. As an implicit and non-digitized task, it ismore healthy for the user. Cameras due to the modern age are something that have become essential, valued,and demonized, as they are the source for all these societal woes. Social media, surviellance, paparazzi areall connotations or digital cameras. While existent in the previous analogue age, film is now considered themore artistic realm of photography, due to it's cultural myth of authenticity.
FILM AS MEMORABILIA
As film and adjacent analogue photography were taken for decades before we had digital, aspects of film cameras and photography can be seen as an antique in nature. To us, it is the look and how we think of the past. Epic magazines such as Life or Magnum were iconized for their use of film to show the diversity and heights of man. “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” We see some of the great images of the 20th century through the lenses of film photography. The image of film photography throughout the century was of capturing moments or and representing art. With the idea of film carries a history and weight of memories, film photography is the most direct way of iconizing memories in the same way one would for scrapbooks, and photo books. Instant film is one example of this. Not made for scanning or the hard drive storage, the survival of instant film, polaroid, and Fujifilm. Much of the history of photography is based on its ability to capture a moment. For sometime, this experience was even labelled, “a Kodak moment,” as keyed by advertisers. In its antique nature, it captures a time and moment and encapsulates it into a physical form. Baudrillard in his novel, System of Objects illustrates this physical form as carrying a symbol of actualization or being fully realized. An object’s presence in history and the now allows for an item to carry what a modern item could not, a symbol of birth, death, heritage. The heritage item has had a long journey from its conception to the modern time, potentially outliving many. This antique is suspended in time symbolizing its origins and that that has happened since. This symbol of an object suspended in time gives an item a moral standing that elevates an object’s significance. The nature of its authenticity out ways any potential issues functionality or rationale in a contemporary setting. The modern stand-in is functional, but the predecessor is mythical. (Baudrillard,p.75) In modern technology, digital cameras are constantly replacing one for the next, in the name of progress and technological development. The analogue formats pre-date all digital cameras and are by that the heritage of photography. This heritage and it’s limitations justifying all inconvenient aesthetic or process differences. Black-and-white or noire for example in a contemporary setting is an unnecessary aesthetic quality. All modern cameras defaultly shoot in colour. It is only in the realm of film where black-and-white is justified. Helmut Newton, famed photographer from 20th century, is known for his lively active, documentarian, and fashion style photography. The older the photographer the more we could excuse elements of their practice that would seem abnormal today. In Newton’s catalogue you could find photos with an unsharp focus and slight issues of lighting. Go back a century to the age, of Queen Victoria the photos become stale, grainy, and exampling the chemical process. Back then it wasn’t uncommon to have a rough image. Contrast this to the works of Greg Williams a contemporary celeb and commercial digital photographer, that imagery is sharp, in focus and black-and-white by aesthetic choice and not requirement. The justified limitations of the past are aesthetic qualities in the contemporary art space.
THE VALUE OF DEGRADATION
Analogue photography in its infancy was an art and a new way of viewing the world. Yet with the advances in technology, modernity, societal progress pushed down the significance of photography as an art. The advent of digital degrades the significance of singular images. Images gradually succumb to a type of mechanical reproduction that has made the art of photography more Inauthentic. Walter Benjamin lays out the grounds for this degradation of art in his essay, Art in Mass Mechanical Reproduction. One must observe that authenticity is significance brought on by an object’s limitations and is always reflective against the true original. While Benjamin matches Baudrillard’s aspect of authenticity being brought on by historical backing and myth, Benjamin elaborates on an image’s relation to its original. An object’s presence in time and space is vital, and this is always relative to its original, as the original is the most authentic art piece. Its presence in time and the degradation it may face is a detail of only adds to its authenticity. As an item is continually reproduced, this specialty gradually becomes lost. Authenticity can’t be reproduced. It lays with the original, and with the continual reproduction, fragments this authenticity. In re interpretative copy was the one way he saw the original as preserving authenticity. For example, film reproductions allow for new aspects of the chemical process to be unveiled, details, and edits that could not be seen before. Yet it with technical copies, that this authenticity of a piece must meet its reproduction halfway leading, this being that fragmentation.(Benjamin, p.3) One of the biggest issues of modern photography as an art is the mass reproducibility and lack of physical. All images today exist in a digitized ether that in a natural world is inaccessible, doomed to live on a screen. The digital frame that images are captured in cheapens the value of collective photography, as the diligence and significance of each shot is diluted to a process of trial and error, that can be captured by the hundreds. You can take a thousand shots in an attempt of taking on an image and it cost the same as one. It is the limitations of film photography that allow it to maintain significance. The financial input to image output, mixed with the diligence and curation required of each image is what allows for a more authentic experience.
WABI SABI
Film is a rougher science as it’s more chemically than the mechanical nature of digital photography. For those not taking the practice at high technical precision, it can there is a larger room for the unexpected and unpredicted. When people listen to vinyl they often admire their crackle in the background. In the same way, vinyl has its crackle, film has grain, a beautiful unpredicted component that comes with the art form. While not present in the West I liken this to the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, a practice known for its passion toward the imperfect, natural elements of work. The ongoing development of an item is as, if not more important in the development of an item. This at any time may be in an evolving or devolving stage of its aesthetic, but you can never truly tell which so in the end you are brought back to respecting its current temporal state. When it comes to film there is a limitation and acceptance to the visuals that are captured in an image. ‘Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of some thing too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.’(Eno, p.283) The messiness brought out of film is probably one of the best elements of film. While one can have a clean image in film, the sharpness, detail, and capture of visuals are far less than its digital counterpart. Testing a medium and taking it to its fullest extent was something that was continuously done.
Wabi-Sabi in Koren’s novel, of the same name, contrasts itself against western modernism. Varying interpretations of modernism depending on the field of study your specifying in. In a brief history, modernism is an art and philosophical movement brought about by industrialization and urbanization. It is characterized by the development of art and ideas that differ from the classical and traditional image. Modernism was trying to remold things for the new world that had emerged rather than in reflection of the previous. The overall message brought forth was of progress and encouraging constant change. In the Canadian Journal of Poltical and Social Theory, Baudrillard wrote ‘As modernity is not an analytic concept, there can be no laws of modernity: there are only traits of modernity. There is no theory of it either: only logic of modernity and an ideology. As the canonical morality of change, it opposes itself to the canonical morality of tradition, but it is nevertheless just as wary of radical change. It is the “tradition of the new (Harold Rosenberg).’(Baudrillard, p.63) Modernity’s whole purpose is to contrast its self and move beyond the past and with that potentially move away from nature and previous traditional frameworks. Relation to nature is not of particular necessity, it’s more about items being admired in the form they are made in, and the anticipation of what will replace them. It’s a constant process of perfecting, re-perfecting, and redefining products. This is in contrast to Wabi Sabi’s eternal recurrence and acceptance of natural processes. Contemporary photography has moved past a necessity for a natural element. Photos are taken then re perfected and re-edited for the consumer. The perfection and meticulously sharp nature of some images taken today can tend to make photography seem more like a rigid science, defrauding it of much of its artistic expression and the human element. Modernism is a strictly constructed man-made look, leaving little room for error, imperfection, or the spontaneities of nature. Modernism was founded in man’s acknowledgment that he is separating from nature. Film allows us to live under the illusion that we are not separating so drastically. Film grain, film burn, degradation, and aging of film, the many imperfections of film is what allows it to hold the human element. It carries a tradition and practice and tradition to it while the contemporary is simplified to tool use, an image no longer needs artistic oeuvre or flaw. The photograph is no longer the final artistic representation it is technical, rigid documentation, or a subject.
CONCLUSION
Analogue is medium of photography that has fought extinction for the past few decades. People are most commonly using it in contrast of digital or because of its aesthetic myth. This myth is one that is relevant to everyone. Some would treat film as a more pure or higher form photography, though potentially this may just be a matter cultural myth. In the modern era while the significance and patience one puts in their craft is important for the everyday individual and professional its not recommended. Even with a modern process that has been refined analogue is something that society has moved past for good reason. It is good for the self-conscious photographer, as one can be more immersed in the practice. To the passionate photographer, one may also see this as a right of passage. The skill of not being able to see the image. Most popularly film can be seen advertised to the modern youth that are deprived of this historical or heritage idea. They are the ones who want polaroids and want to build up this idea of history both in their own personal character and the world around them. Film can be ones method of expression, or self-actualization. It is also primed for youth as the bare for entry is not as costly or digital. This is the reason why fujifilm and polaroid dominate youth spaces, because they will build their idea of heritage, history, or self-actualization. Beyond its convience it is something that can only be candid something that youths are deprived of today, allowing them to return to a sense of the real in their doctured realities. Film is not something that can be recommended but it is also not a format that should be pushed away. It builds character and re-enforces parts of the world that contemporary environments have extinguished, from the arts, to personal image, ritual, or the imperfect.
CHAPTER I: THE EVERYDAY ANALOGUE
Film Used in Contrast toFilm while not many people's first choice, may be chosen as an opposition due to other societalfactors. Film is the most efficient way of getting a physical copy. The continued prevalence of instant filmis probably for this exact reason. Skipping the annoying aspects of development on receives quick one-offs that develop themselves and become their most authentic state of an image. Film doesn t need to be afinancial investment in the same manner digital does. Film rolls and cameras can be found for both cheapand expensive prices, allowing for film to be less expensive in the short term. Even the normal expensivefilm camera is not as expensive as its digital counterpart. With the barriers to entry far lower, this allows fordisposable, instant film, and Polaroids to become fashionable cultural staples. As technology progresses,the standards of digital imagery will only increase, pushing for expensive and less consumer-friendly tech.Film might just be a very consumer-friendly, aesthetic with a consumer-friendly product. Practicing withfilm pushes one to be more diligent, invested, and immersed in the image. In Should I Buy a film camerain 2021, Tech radar journalist, Jason Parnell-Brookes navigates why film continues to spur enthusiasm andonline movements, such as #Filmisnotdead. "There seems to be something about the tactile engagement offilm cameras that photographers crave, which is no surprise when the rest of the world is largely poweredby swipes and impersonal video chats. In an age of instant gratification, we have developed the habit of"chimping" (checking photos on the back screen as soon as we ve taken the shot) with our digital cameras,and this takes us out of the moment. Shoot film, though, and there is no image review, so we must engagewith our subject and surroundings. 'In an age dominated iPhone, bulky DSLRs, and screens, it's nice to havesomething not as screen-based. It is a constant conversation on how these 'screens affect us and the securityrisk that comes with them.When health and academic organizations, report prolonged use of technology has negative sideeffects, it's only practical that we find alternatives to these options. We live with screens every day of ourlives. Organization National Institute of Health and Oxford Academic has clarified that these affect ourdaily lives, to the point that the negative implications are a part of the public conscience. Prolonged use inchildren is said to stifle learning and development. In adults and adolescents, it impacts sleep, mental healthFilm and analogue are an escape from this screen-based reality. As an implicit and non-digitized task, it ismore healthy for the user. Cameras due to the modern age are something that have become essential, valued,and demonized, as they are the source for all these societal woes. Social media, surviellance, paparazzi areall connotations or digital cameras. While existent in the previous analogue age, film is now considered themore artistic realm of photography, due to it's cultural myth of authenticity.
FILM AS MEMORABILIA
As film and adjacent analogue photography were taken for decades before we had digital, aspects of film cameras and photography can be seen as an antique in nature. To us, it is the look and how we think of the past. Epic magazines such as Life or Magnum were iconized for their use of film to show the diversity and heights of man. “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” We see some of the great images of the 20th century through the lenses of film photography. The image of film photography throughout the century was of capturing moments or and representing art. With the idea of film carries a history and weight of memories, film photography is the most direct way of iconizing memories in the same way one would for scrapbooks, and photo books. Instant film is one example of this. Not made for scanning or the hard drive storage, the survival of instant film, polaroid, and Fujifilm. Much of the history of photography is based on its ability to capture a moment. For sometime, this experience was even labelled, “a Kodak moment,” as keyed by advertisers. In its antique nature, it captures a time and moment and encapsulates it into a physical form. Baudrillard in his novel, System of Objects illustrates this physical form as carrying a symbol of actualization or being fully realized. An object’s presence in history and the now allows for an item to carry what a modern item could not, a symbol of birth, death, heritage. The heritage item has had a long journey from its conception to the modern time, potentially outliving many. This antique is suspended in time symbolizing its origins and that that has happened since. This symbol of an object suspended in time gives an item a moral standing that elevates an object’s significance. The nature of its authenticity out ways any potential issues functionality or rationale in a contemporary setting. The modern stand-in is functional, but the predecessor is mythical. (Baudrillard,p.75) In modern technology, digital cameras are constantly replacing one for the next, in the name of progress and technological development. The analogue formats pre-date all digital cameras and are by that the heritage of photography. This heritage and it’s limitations justifying all inconvenient aesthetic or process differences. Black-and-white or noire for example in a contemporary setting is an unnecessary aesthetic quality. All modern cameras defaultly shoot in colour. It is only in the realm of film where black-and-white is justified. Helmut Newton, famed photographer from 20th century, is known for his lively active, documentarian, and fashion style photography. The older the photographer the more we could excuse elements of their practice that would seem abnormal today. In Newton’s catalogue you could find photos with an unsharp focus and slight issues of lighting. Go back a century to the age, of Queen Victoria the photos become stale, grainy, and exampling the chemical process. Back then it wasn’t uncommon to have a rough image. Contrast this to the works of Greg Williams a contemporary celeb and commercial digital photographer, that imagery is sharp, in focus and black-and-white by aesthetic choice and not requirement. The justified limitations of the past are aesthetic qualities in the contemporary art space.
THE VALUE OF DEGRADATION
Analogue photography in its infancy was an art and a new way of viewing the world. Yet with the advances in technology, modernity, societal progress pushed down the significance of photography as an art. The advent of digital degrades the significance of singular images. Images gradually succumb to a type of mechanical reproduction that has made the art of photography more Inauthentic. Walter Benjamin lays out the grounds for this degradation of art in his essay, Art in Mass Mechanical Reproduction. One must observe that authenticity is significance brought on by an object’s limitations and is always reflective against the true original. While Benjamin matches Baudrillard’s aspect of authenticity being brought on by historical backing and myth, Benjamin elaborates on an image’s relation to its original. An object’s presence in time and space is vital, and this is always relative to its original, as the original is the most authentic art piece. Its presence in time and the degradation it may face is a detail of only adds to its authenticity. As an item is continually reproduced, this specialty gradually becomes lost. Authenticity can’t be reproduced. It lays with the original, and with the continual reproduction, fragments this authenticity. In re interpretative copy was the one way he saw the original as preserving authenticity. For example, film reproductions allow for new aspects of the chemical process to be unveiled, details, and edits that could not be seen before. Yet it with technical copies, that this authenticity of a piece must meet its reproduction halfway leading, this being that fragmentation.(Benjamin, p.3) One of the biggest issues of modern photography as an art is the mass reproducibility and lack of physical. All images today exist in a digitized ether that in a natural world is inaccessible, doomed to live on a screen. The digital frame that images are captured in cheapens the value of collective photography, as the diligence and significance of each shot is diluted to a process of trial and error, that can be captured by the hundreds. You can take a thousand shots in an attempt of taking on an image and it cost the same as one. It is the limitations of film photography that allow it to maintain significance. The financial input to image output, mixed with the diligence and curation required of each image is what allows for a more authentic experience.
WABI SABI
Film is a rougher science as it’s more chemically than the mechanical nature of digital photography. For those not taking the practice at high technical precision, it can there is a larger room for the unexpected and unpredicted. When people listen to vinyl they often admire their crackle in the background. In the same way, vinyl has its crackle, film has grain, a beautiful unpredicted component that comes with the art form. While not present in the West I liken this to the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, a practice known for its passion toward the imperfect, natural elements of work. The ongoing development of an item is as, if not more important in the development of an item. This at any time may be in an evolving or devolving stage of its aesthetic, but you can never truly tell which so in the end you are brought back to respecting its current temporal state. When it comes to film there is a limitation and acceptance to the visuals that are captured in an image. ‘Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of some thing too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.’(Eno, p.283) The messiness brought out of film is probably one of the best elements of film. While one can have a clean image in film, the sharpness, detail, and capture of visuals are far less than its digital counterpart. Testing a medium and taking it to its fullest extent was something that was continuously done.
Wabi-Sabi in Koren’s novel, of the same name, contrasts itself against western modernism. Varying interpretations of modernism depending on the field of study your specifying in. In a brief history, modernism is an art and philosophical movement brought about by industrialization and urbanization. It is characterized by the development of art and ideas that differ from the classical and traditional image. Modernism was trying to remold things for the new world that had emerged rather than in reflection of the previous. The overall message brought forth was of progress and encouraging constant change. In the Canadian Journal of Poltical and Social Theory, Baudrillard wrote ‘As modernity is not an analytic concept, there can be no laws of modernity: there are only traits of modernity. There is no theory of it either: only logic of modernity and an ideology. As the canonical morality of change, it opposes itself to the canonical morality of tradition, but it is nevertheless just as wary of radical change. It is the “tradition of the new (Harold Rosenberg).’(Baudrillard, p.63) Modernity’s whole purpose is to contrast its self and move beyond the past and with that potentially move away from nature and previous traditional frameworks. Relation to nature is not of particular necessity, it’s more about items being admired in the form they are made in, and the anticipation of what will replace them. It’s a constant process of perfecting, re-perfecting, and redefining products. This is in contrast to Wabi Sabi’s eternal recurrence and acceptance of natural processes. Contemporary photography has moved past a necessity for a natural element. Photos are taken then re perfected and re-edited for the consumer. The perfection and meticulously sharp nature of some images taken today can tend to make photography seem more like a rigid science, defrauding it of much of its artistic expression and the human element. Modernism is a strictly constructed man-made look, leaving little room for error, imperfection, or the spontaneities of nature. Modernism was founded in man’s acknowledgment that he is separating from nature. Film allows us to live under the illusion that we are not separating so drastically. Film grain, film burn, degradation, and aging of film, the many imperfections of film is what allows it to hold the human element. It carries a tradition and practice and tradition to it while the contemporary is simplified to tool use, an image no longer needs artistic oeuvre or flaw. The photograph is no longer the final artistic representation it is technical, rigid documentation, or a subject.
CONCLUSION
Analogue is medium of photography that has fought extinction for the past few decades. People are most commonly using it in contrast of digital or because of its aesthetic myth. This myth is one that is relevant to everyone. Some would treat film as a more pure or higher form photography, though potentially this may just be a matter cultural myth. In the modern era while the significance and patience one puts in their craft is important for the everyday individual and professional its not recommended. Even with a modern process that has been refined analogue is something that society has moved past for good reason. It is good for the self-conscious photographer, as one can be more immersed in the practice. To the passionate photographer, one may also see this as a right of passage. The skill of not being able to see the image. Most popularly film can be seen advertised to the modern youth that are deprived of this historical or heritage idea. They are the ones who want polaroids and want to build up this idea of history both in their own personal character and the world around them. Film can be ones method of expression, or self-actualization. It is also primed for youth as the bare for entry is not as costly or digital. This is the reason why fujifilm and polaroid dominate youth spaces, because they will build their idea of heritage, history, or self-actualization. Beyond its convience it is something that can only be candid something that youths are deprived of today, allowing them to return to a sense of the real in their doctured realities. Film is not something that can be recommended but it is also not a format that should be pushed away. It builds character and re-enforces parts of the world that contemporary environments have extinguished, from the arts, to personal image, ritual, or the imperfect.