Film Eulogy

Since George Eastman gave us film in 1884, pivotal moments of change in our society have been recorded by trapping light between emulsion layers onto silver halide.

The imaginations of the Irving Penns, Helmut Newtons, and Ansel Adams of the world have been brought to life on film.

Remember the sickly sweet chemical smell as you tore away the protective foil, revealing a canister shielding the layers of precious metal and gelatin from being polluted with unintentional light?

Remember the challenge of lining up the film lead with the camera sprockets for minimal waste, squeezing every last frame from each cartridge?  Oh, lucky day when the counter hit 39!  

If you did manage to catch that signature image or defining societal moment, you then had to drop your precious light sensitive media off at a lab for processing.

Would their rollers be clean, the chemicals fresh, the temperature right? Would the person handling the film be competent? If the processing stars lined up perfectly you might end up with more than just the Magnificent 11 like Robert Capa. 
The experience of watching that first ghostly image slowly reveal itself in the dim orange darkroom light will be missed by future generations of budding photographers.  As will the visceral feel of using a finely crafted piece of German optics to inspect film size images contact printed onto a rich paper surface…. 

Oh, who are we kidding.  When romanticizing shooting with film, it is easy to gloss over the tremendous environmental damage caused by dumping your fixer down the drain or processing Kodachrome film.  Most of us will be lucky not to die of cancer from all the toxic chemicals inhaled or absorbed into our skin while producing analog imagery.  To quote Roland of Gilead, “The world has moved on”.

The limitations of shooting film are also easily forgotten.  As photographers we got used to stopping and changing rolls every 12 to 36 frames.  We had to pick and choose our shots judiciously in order to achieve the results we were after.  We had to carry a separate camera or back attachment loaded with expensive film in order to get an instant (90 second) color preview (”The final film will look better than that, I promise!”)  We carried additional cameras so we had a choice of color or black and white film stock.

George Eastman wrote in his suicide note:  “My work is done.  Why wait?”  Digital has surpassed and replaced film as the primary method of capturing images and like it’s inventor, film’s work is done.  

We can wax nostalgic and cling to our happy analog memories but we should all prepare ourselves to work with the tools provided through our digital inheritance.

Rest in Peace
Michael Britt