Taking Photographs and Other Noble Pursuits

In practicing photography, I have found an interesting dynamic between its practical side and its artistic side. Don't get me wrong, I love taking photographs with my iPhone, and, in fact, I often take the same photograph on both my phone and on my camera. This is generally for one of four reasons: I want it documented in color, I want the photograph in that moment, I want a future location and time reference, or just general anxiety over not developing the roll of film correctly and being devastated that photo will be lost forever.

The above photographs were taken within moments of each other at 42 Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, Paris, France, at 10:23am on March 21. We can thank the metadata from the above photograph on the left for that information. In the moment, I took that photograph on my iPhone to capture the colors, and then experience a slight panic on the streets of Paris regarding the possibility that my film could have gone through too many x-ray machines and that everything would be ruined (despite the fact that I knew my ISO was low enough to survive the x-rays).

And in that moment, I thought that this photograph would be the best thing I captured all trip. Being a token member of Gen Z, I posted the photo to the left on my Instagram Story that evening. I haven't thought about it much since, except for with anticipation upon taking the freshly developed film off of the reel and placing it into the drying rack a few days upon returning home from Europe. Despite knowing this photograph would be far from one of the better photographs I took while in Paris, I still took the twenty minutes or so to make a test print of the photograph, and pinned it on the wall during one of our class critiques. In my defense of this photograph, I brought up the notion that it felt very Stephen Shore American Surfaces-like, and showed my professor the picture I shot on iPhone. Why yes, it felt reminiscent of Shore due to the colors that weren't captured with my Ilford HP5 black and white film, and the photograph was placed aside.

I ended up placing two photographs from Paris into my final portfolio, pictured below. The one on the left was taken on a busy shopping street in Paris, the right from Luxembourg Gardens. While you can disregard the discoloration of these two photos as they're scans of prints I made in the dark room, we will never see these photographs in color, as there was no iPhone documentation of these moments. In fact, there are only a few photos on my phone from moments surrounding these photographs at all. They were both taken in the afternoon. If we look closely at the right photo, perhaps we will find some indication of the day the photograph was taken. The left photo is somewhat indicative of the state of current affairs. Otherwise, these photos are relatively free from specifics.

In preparation for my summer internship, I read Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits by Debbie Millman in May. Coined as "a series of illuminating and spirited conversations on branding with twenty-two of the world's top design executives, strategists, and critics", I consumed the book while noting various tips and advice from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Wally Olins, and Brian Collins. While it was an enjoyable book with a gold mine of information, there was one thing that irked me: if I were to read this book in the future, even just a couple of years into the future, it would be completely outdated. The specifics, if you will, in this book are terribly time-sensitive. Even in reading the book just a year or two after a new edition was published, I felt like there were a few questionable statements that were documented.

And yes, I know that is how time works. Things come and things go, and in the world we live in now, we can't even seem to remember what was popular, or "went viral", a month ago. It was that moment that I realized why I have become so enamored with the world of photography: my iPhone photos that live somewhere between the phone sitting on my kitchen table and the infamous "cloud" that is tossed around in conversation will eventually be lost. It is only a matter of time that the clarity and metadata captured on the iPhone photos will be considered outdated and the information will be deemed worthless.

This sad reality is one of the few reasons for my love affair with the analog camera. In its purest essence, it is a timeless practice of capturing moments in time that need neither date nor time. Although it is certainly a "dying" art, I would like to hope that the method of taking photographs on an analog camera, developing it, and making prints on an enlarger in the darkroom will be practiced for decades to come, after the iPhone has been replaced a myriad of times. If you abide by the proper measurements and time needed to properly develop film and prints, you will have your film and photographs for forever. After all, we've all been in a vintage shop where there are buckets of old film and photographs taken in the early 20th century.

What I practice now is what my professor practiced in school forty years ago, and something that I only hope will be practiced in the future. The sheer timelessness of analog photography, while it is a time-consuming pursuit, is a noble one. Sometimes you're delighted with a remarkable photograph, sometimes you don't realize you have your camera on the wrong setting and you were shooting on the incorrect ISO the entire day. And sometimes a photograph you thought was wonderful is simply mediocre.

However, the photographs we take on our analog cameras are forever. As a photographer, I believe that they're timeless, they require attention to detail, and they require patience. They require everything the iPhone does not, and dare I say a portion of what modern technology doesn't want us to have either. And for all non-photographers, I ask that you simply consider more protective ways to commemorate special moments in your life. Perhaps print out a few photographs, store them places other than the cloud and Facebook.