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More Than a Thousand Words THE ALCHEMIST-PHOTOGRAPHERS KEEPING FILM ALIVE IN 2021 By Alexandra Kennon
Kenwood Kennon, a long-time film enthusiast, looking at 35-millimeter slides he took in the 1970s. Photos by Alexandra Kennon.
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y iPhone currently contains 33,157 images. The primary subjects are myself and my friends, my cat and dog, and an embarrassing number of food photographs. These days, amassing such a quantity of photos is all too easy. To immortalize anything, after all, requires only that one pulls a handheld rectangle from their pocket and clicks a button. But the human impulse to preserve our memories—or lives—is hardly a new phenomenon. Far from it. The concept of photography—a term that comes from the Greek words “photo” meaning “light” and “graphy” meaning “to capture or record”—has existed in some form since around the fifth century B.C.E. Even then, it was not until sometime in the eleventh century that an Iraqi scientist invented the camera obscura, the modern photographic camera’s earliest ancestor, which allowed an image to be projected upside-down through a small hole into a darkened area. Photography as we know it today—well, something more
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akin to it, anyway—did not exist until daguerrotypes were developed in the 1800s, which had to be exposed to light for nearly fifteen minutes to create an image. Still, capturing a photograph was limited to the very wealthy, a far cry from the universality of today’s cell phone cameras; that is, until the 1880s, when George Eastman started a company known as Kodak. By manufacturing a roll of flexible film rather than the solid plates previously required, Eastman was able to develop a self-contained box camera with a small single lens. By the late 1940s, 35-millimeter film was inexpensive enough for the average person to afford. The advancements thereafter were more rapid: with the 1950s came the Nikon F, an SLR-style camera that could accommodate interchangeable lenses; in the 1960s Polaroid was marketing relatively affordable instant cameras; the 1970s and ‘80s brought the first “smart cameras” that automatically calculated focus, aperture, and shutter speed. By the 1990s, multiple manufacturers had
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released digital cameras that stored images electronically rather than on film. This of course has escalated to today’s cell phone cameras, allowing us to upload any of our more than 33,000 impulsivelycaptured food photos to Instagram faster than one could have even configured shutter speed only a few decades prior. My personal predisposition toward hoarding my memories, both substantial and minute, is something I get from my father, Kenwood. As a young adult in the 1960s and ‘70s, he was a devotee of film; seldom seen without his Minolta any time after 1964. Today, his old gutted and renovated schoolbus, which he once traveled the country in, sits in his yard. Inside live boxes, upon boxes, upon boxes of 35-millimeter slides—much less compact than my preferred hoarding method inside a pocket-sized electronic rectangle, and admittedly, way cooler. Rather than braving Black Friday shopping crowds in a pandemic, the day after Thanksgiving I asked if he would go through some of these slides with me. “This is a monumental task we’re looking
at,” he warned me that morning. “There’s roughly a bajillion of them.” And while we didn’t make it through all bajillion slides—not yet, anyway— he did set up a light box and show me quite a few. Not unlike the memories most often captured by today’s digital and cell phone cameras, slide upon slide revealed his friends, his dog, his travels. The physical film struck me as so much more tangible and intentional than digital images, and got me thinking— respecting—the countless photographers who still, in this fresh year of 2021, choose to capture photographs on film, despite the countless more convenient options available. I spoke with a few of the photographers who elect for the tangible work of a darkroom over simply uploading images to a computer. Here is the wisdom they shared on an art that by all practicality could be obsolete, if not for reverent alchemists such as these, keeping it alive.
