Darkroom: Zine about Film Photograpy by Monica Paige Wilner

â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Darkroom

Zine about Film Photography

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–These Professional Photographers Are Still Shooting Film. Here’s Why

Polaroid

–Polaroid instantly changed photography, and its legacy lives on

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–Film isn’t dead: The large format revolution is here

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Here’s Why

Alexandra Genova Jan 26, 2017

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–These Professional Photographers Are Still Shooting Film.

Photography is arguably the most contradictory art form. It can be objective but also intensely emotional. It’s immediate but not really complete until it’s been processed or edited. It claims to capture reality but in fact only captures a version of it. And caught at the center of this whirling identity crisis are two distinctly different mediums: digital and analog.

Nostalgia for the physical means film photography is easy to romanticize. But most professionals agree that it’s the tactile process not the idea of it that is most compelling. “For me there’s no romance,” photojournalist Rena Effendi tells TIME. “It is always about the work.” Though film may be something of a novelty to the Instagram-generation, for many photographers it’s simply what they’ve always known. “I have a deep affinity with shooting film,” says Dan Winters, known for his celebrity portraiture and scientific photography. “I love seeing that image appear through the chemistry and smelling the dark room chemicals; the smells of my childhood. That grounds me.” While Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin says film has more substance and depth: “It exists. As opposed to 0s and 1s.” David Benjamin Sherry, a photographer and artist who shoots, processes and prints his own work says the physicality of it is an extension of himself: “There’s a spirituality that’s connected to it. I go out to take the pictures and at the end of the day I’m by myself, alone with my thoughts, in the dark room. It becomes very meditative.”

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The birth of digital in the 1970s marked a revolution that threatened to leave analogue in the grainy dust. But despite lightning advances in technology, there has been a small and quiet resistance among amateurs and professionals, solidified by Kodak’s announcement this month that it’s bringing Ektachrome film back to life.

Working with film requires a disciplined, considered approach. “You can make all these decisions without the camera. And then take a picture of it.” says Magnum photographer Max Pinckers. “And for me that works because I can make my decision and stick with it.” The serendipity of a moment that cannot be erased and the separation of the editing process not only demands a more thoughtful method but also frequently engenders “the perfect mistake.” Rather than discarding his errors, Pinckers, who shoots most of his work on film, celebrates these happy accidents. “I don’t review or learn from my mistakes – I use them,” he says. “The mistakes in the work very often function in a positive sense; they surprise you. With a digital camera the room for error is much smaller.” Jessica Dimmock, a documentary photojournalist, adds: “I think that there’s something a little more mindful and deliberate about film that’s really appealing and that’s part of the comeback. We can all get whatever we need on our phones anywhere at any time, there’s something really nice about removing photography from that immediate equation.” This Is Why Film Photography Is Making a Comeback Practicalities aside, there is no doubt in the minds of these practitioners that the aesthetic of film photography is far sexier than its digital sister. It may be the straightforward chemistry but the unexpected palette, the grain and dynamic range on offer all give personality and delicate nuance to the finished result. “I love the surprise colors of film. Each time I go to a country and take the same roll of film, I come back with a different palette of colors,” says Effendi. “Digital kind of evens it out but with film you really see colors of different countries.” Meanwhile, for portraitist Ryan Pfluger, shooting on a Mamiya RZ Pro II with Kodak Ektachrome

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In the age of instant gratification, waiting for results for longer than a nano-second can seem impractical. But slowing down the process can produce surprising results. And for Pfluger, that’s the point. “To say that film is impractical because we need everything immediately, well there’s nothing immediate about photography,” he says. “It’s like why read a book or why write something down on paper, if it’s so impractical?” In a world already saturated with images, he believes that taking the time to be thoughtful about what you’re putting out is essential. The Best Film Cameras You Can Buy Right Now A slower, more considered approach also makes for a more thoughtful relationship with the subject. “It’s a more of a human experience for me when I work with my film camera,” says Effendi. “Whereas with digital I feel there is some sort of barrier between me and the person; the relationship between me and my camera becomes more prominent.” As a photojournalist, it also forces her to approach a news story from a different vantage point. She took her Rolleiflex to document the war between Georgia and Russia in 2008. “There were easily 400 other photographers covering the conflict,” she says. “But the slowness of the camera made me work in a different way, made me go to other places.” By working within these limitations, she ended up with portraits and intimate scenes rather than images of devastation. If photography is a conversation between

the cameraman and the subject, film provokes a far more fertile relationship. A film camera – especially the impressivelooking large format models – demand the attention of the sitter. “When I got Brad Pitt in front of the 4X5 camera, he and the entire set became very engaged,” Winters says. “There was a definite feeling that this was a big event.” Pfluger, who has shot everyone from Obama to Tilda Swinton, agrees that with studio shoots the atmosphere and process is more organic. “With film you have a certain pace with your work and that helps with the interaction,” he says. “There is certainly a different kind of respect. But for me it’s kind of an eye roll. I don’t want the thing about my work to be that you’re excited I’m shooting film.” The Best Film For Every Photo Situations The rich history of film photography can be a tantalizing — and for some, essential – element. LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer who focuses on topics of social and environmental justice, believes that it’s her responsibility as an artist to locate herself within the history and paradigm of her practice. “If I want my work to have a visual language that’s in conversation with the social documentary work of the 20th century then I need to use that medium and their tools,” she explains. “And so when my work stands next to a Walker Evans or a Gordon Parks in the museum, there’s a continuity. It’s about me respecting the practice and respecting the history.” Creative control – or lack of – is what forces photographers to choose a certain camera over another. But for Magnum photographer Larry Towell, his best results come when shooting both film and digital simultaneously. For his recent project at Standing Rock he only shot black-andwhite images but used a Sony Alpha a7R II and a Hasselblad XPan at the same time. “I find when I’m doing layouts, I’m combining

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film produces a “creamy ‘70s tone” that channels his fascination with memory and nostalgia. “Film gives me the ability to do a lot of subtle things that I can’t do digitally,” he explains. “You get that grain in the blacks and in your creamy whites.”

digital and film formats on the same page. So that allows me to be more creative in terms of design,” he says. “Working them in combination fits more with my aesthetic these days.” Towell has no plans to abandon film completely because “well, film’s just better” but combining the two mediums gives him more options and consequently more control.

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â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Polaroid

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Dave Stelfox Oct. 25, 2012

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â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Polaroid instantly changed photography, and its legacy lives on

Sixty-five years ago Edwin Land launched the Polaroid camera, changing the way we think of both photography and technology forever.

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The instant camera that Land, a Harvard dropout, had shown to the American Optical Society was not Polaroid’s first innovation. His company had already experimented with polarising filters to reduce the effects of car headlight glare and produced goggles for fighter pilots serving in the Second World War. But it was by far its most enduring and most profitable. Inspired by a simple question from Land’s three-year-old daughter as to why she couldn’t immediately view a set of pictures he had taken of her with his Rolleiflex while out for a family walk, it took years to realise and was the perfect embodiment of his maxim: “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”

“Both companies specialised in relentless, obsessive refinement of their technologies,” Bonanos writes. “Both were established close to great research universities to attract talent (Polaroid was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it drew from Harvard and MIT; Apple has Stanford and Berkeley nearby). Both fetishised superior, elegant, covetable product design. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary-godheadinventor-genius.” By 1948, Polaroid had released the Model 95. Known as a Land Camera, it brought the same revolutionary processes its inventor had exhibited a year earlier into the hands of the everyday consumer. All its users had to do was press the shutter button, remove the negative from the back, wait for one minute, tear off a strip of protective paper and, hey presto, a fully formed photograph was revealed. It

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On February 21, 1947, a young man stood before a room and unveiled a brand new creation. He fired the shutter of an 8x10 camera, pulled out a sandwich of paper, ran it through a set of mechanical rollers, then set a timer. “Fifty seconds,” he told the crowd. Once the clock had finished its countdown, he peeled one sheet away from the other and showed them a perfect sepia portrait of himself. The audience gasped in amazement. The next morning a press photograph of the inventor, seated behind a table in a white shirt and striped tie, holding a picture of that very same scene ran alongside a glowing editorial in The New York Times. By the following Monday it was picture of the week in Life magazine. The man’s name was Edwin Land and his showpiece was the very first Polaroid image.

think about photography forever, Land altered our relationship with technology in much the same way. More than that, his company’s early triumphs provided a road map for innovators right up to the present day - most notably the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.

As a new book by Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid, explains, if the instant camera changed the way we

Instant UAE by Silvia Razgova

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Despite this reception, instant cameras were in the beginning widely viewed by professionals as “an amateur’s gadget and nothing more”. However, at a later gathering of the American Optical Society, Land met someone who helped him to radically alter this opinion: the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams. As a master technician, Adams was enthused by Land’s invention, but felt that the pictures left a little to be desired. Accordingly, he offered his opinions as to how the system could be refined. On the spot Land hired him as a consultant. This relationship coupled with Land’s innate perfectionism led Polaroid to shoot for ever higher standards of image quality. The original pack film was constantly updated and eventually transformed into what Land termed “integral film”, a self-contained package of negative, developer and an opaque chemical shield that would turn transparent as soon as the photograph was ready to be seen. The cameras evolved into aesthetic masterpieces such as the folding SX-70, released in 1972. In fact, the combination of these two products is what the vast majority of people think of when they think of Polaroid. A beautifully finished piece of equipment that dispenses whitebordered images at the push of a button. By this point, the company was making billions but Land was more than a businessman. He was a true believer in his own products and wanted to realise their potential as fully as possible. At Adams’s suggestion, he spent years devising the Polaroid 20x24, a large-format camera capable of producing both a huge print and corresponding negative. Beloved of Chuck Close, Richard Avedon and Mary

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caused a near riot in stores and sold out immediately.

Ellen Mark for its incredible resolution and limitless possibilities for enlargement, it represents the very peak of Polaroid imaging. Land’s fascination with photography also drove him to establish a phenomenal library of contemporary works. In order to aid the development of his products, he cultivated a number of prominent practitioners, supplying them with film in exchange for the occasional contribution to the Polaroid Collection. Over time the company’s archive came to encompass pieces by the likes of Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe and André Kertész. It also included pictures by amateur users, community projects, schoolchildren and company employees.

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Unfortunately, unlike Jobs, Land would not get to see the ultimate realisation of his ideas. Nor would his last memories be of a company at the vanguard of technology. In 1977 the firm launched Polavision, an instant movie system that he had championed for years, against the recommendations of many of his closest advisors. Superseded by videotape before it was even released, it was a financial disaster, losing the company the better

This one event can be viewed as the start of Polaroid’s decline, but it is possible that its business model of ceaseless experimentation and painstaking research and development was simply not sustainable any more. Either way, Polaroid was no longer Land’s baby. In his later years he withdrew from the company, passing away in 1991 at the age of 81 - just nine weeks after the birth of the World Wide Web. In the years following its founder’s death, Polaroid followed a trajectory of declining ideas and diminishing returns. Instead of forging ahead into new worlds, such as the emerging territory of digital photography, it pursued a programme of price-cutting, rehashing old products and finding ever more creative ways to undermine its previous credibility. It even launched a design in the shape of Warner Bros’s Tasmanian Devil cartoon character that spat pictures out of its mouth.

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And it is these vernacular contributions that offer the best illustration of Land’s essential vision. Like Jobs and many more modernday mavericks, the driving force behind his work was the idea of connecting ordinary people. As Bonanos outlines: “Watching your own face slowly appear out of the grey-green mist of developing chemicals [of a Polaroid image] is a peculiar and captivating experience ... There is no more social form of picture taking.” With a little imagination, it is possible to see Land’s idea of instant photography as an early precursor to image-sharing networks such as Pinterest and Flickr.

part of half a billion dollars and, worst of all, precipitating Land’s resignation as chairman in March 1980.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the company lost money and ran up huge debts. In 2001 Polaroid finally filed for bankruptcy. It was bought out by the investment arm of the US financial institution BankOne and sold for a $180 million (Dh662 million) profit to Petters Group Worldwide in 2005. Under the right leadership, the once-revered institution may have been salvageable, but it soon became apparent that the private equity firm in question had no interest in doing any such thing. In February 2008, 60 years after Land launched the first instant camera, Polaroid’s new owners ceased production of film. Press releases cited “marketplace conditions” and the fact that the advent of

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Enthusiasts were dismayed. Many launched a campaign to keep their favourite film going. Others bought up the remaining stock, some selling it on to fellow devotees. Among them was the Austrian entrepreneur Florian Kaps. Fortunately he recognised something Polaroidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s board did not. The reason for the premature demise of Polaroid film - the Petters team had initially calculated that it had enough materials to keep going until at least 2014 - was that people still wanted it. Even though digital had become the standard for both professional and casual photographers, analogue shooting was undergoing a quiet renaissance. And this wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just down to die-hard Polaroid users. Some years previously, Fuji had cut a deal with the company allowing it to manufacture instant cameras and film for the Japanese market. Its Instax range was enjoying considerable success. More importantly, Lomography was booming. This playful style of image-making uses conventional film and takes its name from a shoddily assembled brand of Russianmade toy camera. A growing number of hobbyists around the world had come to the realisation that while digital technology allowed anyone to produce crisp, homogenous pictures, these plastic-lensed contraptions offered images that were tangible, endearingly flawed and unique. Kaps hit upon an idea. While production of instant film may no longer have generated

worthwhile profits for a large corporation, a boutique operation might stand a chance. He contacted Polaroid and attempted to buy the rights and machinery necessary to produce the film himself. The company said nothing, but it did invite him to the closing party for its last remaining plant in the town of Enschede, in the Netherlands. The factory was scheduled for demolition shortly after this last hurrah and all of its machines were already supposed to have been sold off for scrap. However, chatting to the former manager, Andre Bosman, Kaps learned that the property deal had stalled and the equipment remained intact. The two men began to discuss the feasibility of resurrecting the business. Even though the real estate and machinery still existed, the big stumbling block was that the chemicals were no longer being made. Kaps was astonished to hear Bosman say that, given a little time, he might be able to come up with a new formula using readily available materials. Over the next few days the two men managed to delay the destruction of the factory equipment long enough to buy it. This was made easier than it might have been by the fact that the Petters Group was falling apart - its owner, Tom Petters, had been arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. He was later jailed for 50 years. Kaps gladly took advantage of the situation, raising $2.6 million of start-up capital and taking out a lease on the building. Naming their venture The Impossible Project, Kaps and Bosman started out with a skeletal staff from the old Polaroid operation. The team plugged away for several months and in March 2010 succeeded in launching two films. OK, so this new stock was only available in black and white, was nowhere near as sharp or fast as its predecessor and needed to be shielded from the light as soon as it

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the digital camera had killed the analogue film industry, but the truth was that on their takeover the management team bought up only enough proprietary chemicals to keep the brand in production for 10 years. By that time, they figured, instant photography would have breathed its last and they could get on with their real business: breaking up the company and selling off its assets.

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While the latest, post-Petters owners of the Polaroid brand are now concentrating on digital imaging, The Impossible Project is not only keeping the old flame alive, it is also introducing to a new wave of users the joys of instant photography. “We do sell to established Polaroid customers,” says company spokeswoman Marlene Kelnreiter. “But the majority of our buyers are between 13 and 25 years old... Young people now seem to like the idea of photography that they can touch.” As heartwarming as the instant film revival is, recent events show that the true inheritors of Land’s legacy share his dedication to the pursuit of the new. In April this year the founders of the iPhone application Instagram sold their business to Facebook for $1bn. In its commercial success and its core concepts of speed and user-friendliness, mobile photography is the direct descendant of its analogue predecessor. Its predominantly squareformat, retro-processed images recreate Polaroid’s aesthetic and its interfaces play on a sense of nostalgia for a more tactile, organic era of photography. Instagram’s branding even references Polaroid’s distinctive rainbow stripes. What is more, Land as good as predicted its existence 40 years earlier. In 1970 he made a corporate film in which he spoke of “a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses ... something that would be with you every day”. Bonanos writes: “It would be effortless. Point, shoot, see. The gesture

would be as simple as ... taking a wallet from your breast pocket, holding it up and pressing the button.” It is no coincidence that smartphone images have come in for much the same criticism as Polaroid did in its early days. For some purists they are quite simply not real photography either. However, many respected professionals are now embracing this medium too. The difference is the area of practice in which it is being most effectively deployed. Where Polaroid’s painterly tones seduced the high-profile art crowd, the speed and ease of transmission afforded by smartphone apps has made them perfect for the fast-moving world of photojournalism. From Michael C Brown’s dispatches from the Libyan revolution to Balazs Gardi’s Basetrack project, the iPhone is now almost as ubiquitous in conflict photography as it is on the pages of Facebook and Twitter. In February 2011, the New York Times photographer Damon Winter won third place in the feature story category of the Pictures of the Year international competition with a story shot entirely on such a device. Titled A Grunt’s Life, it captured quotidian moments during a tour of northern Afghanistan with the 87th Infantry regiment of the US army. It is an effective and intimate piece of work, but the heavy vignetting and super-saturated colour applied by the Hipstamatic application caused a furore among traditionalists. Benjamin Lowy, a New York-based photographer who uses smartphones extensively in his own work explains: “Years ago 5x4 photographers hated the 35mm format, then black and white photographers hated colour ... Many of the issues surrounding mobile phone photography are very similar, but the worries over nostalgic, retro effects are

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emerged from the camera. The important thing was that it worked. The company now employs 60 people, produces an expanding range of monochrome and colour films, and has shops in Tokyo, New York, Vienna and Paris. Shifting roughly 750,000 units in the last year alone, its future looks bright.

valid for me too.”

Were Land alive today, it is difficult to imagine him being anything other than at the forefront of such developments. He may have been the leader of a global business empire, but he was, first and foremost, a visionary genius blessed with an innate understanding of the power of the photographic image. As the physicist and philosopher Philip Morrison said of Polaroid’s innovations back in 1972, they provided a means to apply “a rich texture to memory. More than that, thoughtful use [helped to] reveal meaning in the flood of images which make up so much of human life.”

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Dave Stelfox is a photographer and journalist. He lives in London.

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In a wonderful case of symmetry, these concerns have ushered Lowy into a role that echoes the relationship Adams had with Polaroid, collaborating with Hipstamatic to make the application more suitable for documentary use. “Myself, Michael Brown and Damon Winter sat down together and discussed what we needed,” he says. “Our idea was to create unaffected images. We wanted to silence the purists who were saying that the filters many apps apply automatically were unethical, that they were not a real representation of what we were seeing. We emailed Hipstamatic and they were very responsive and happy to work with us.” Within a few months Lowy was sent a custom-made profile that conformed to these specifications. Now, after more than a year of testing and revisions, it is close to a commercial release. He has used it for everything from his ongoing coverage of Afghanistan to a recent assignment on the Democratic and Republican conventions for The New Yorker. “The idea of a camera

that you can take everywhere with you is nothing new,” he says. “Smartphones and apps like Hipstamatic are just the latest development and they are amazing tools that open up a lot of possibilities for us as image-makers - in the way we see and represent things, and in the way we distribute our work and tell our stories.”

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â&#x20AC;&#x201C;View Camera 29

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British Journal of Photography May 25, 2017

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â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Film isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t dead: The large format revolution is here

The founder of the company responsible for the world’s lightest, most affordable and compact large-format film camera tells us how they did it. Of the many adjectives you could use to describe large-format film photography, affordable isn’t the first that springs to mind. But one Brighton based start-up is on a mission to change that. Hot on the success of their £250 4×5 camera, which they financed through crowdfunding, the Intrepid Camera Company has today launched their Kickstarter for an 8×10 model.

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“I was making these really simple things – essentially just boxes with lenses on the end, using instant film and using photographic paper to make paper negatives,” he remembers. Originally Grew’s vision was to create the world’s first open source large-format camera and publish the design online for anyone to use. But as the project developed he realised there was potential to create an even better camera that would be commercially available. “Traditional large format cameras are made in small numbers, they use expensive hardwood and expensive metal components, really high quality finish,”

Intrepid’s Kickstarter campaign captured the imagination of a photography world hungry for new ways to explore early processes, and the company raised almost triple its original £27,000 target. “I think there were just a lot of people like myself who wanted to use that type of camera and didn’t have access to it because they were priced out of the market.” The appeal for Grew is that large-format film photography is about creating a tangible, unique object in an age of digital overload. “I love getting a one-off print where just that one image existed,” he says.

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Intrepid’s founder-director Maxim Grew had the idea for the camera while midway through an undergraduate degree in Product Design at the University of Sussex. He’d become increasingly fascinated by the format beloved of photography greats from Ansel Adams to Gregory Crewdson for its magical, contemplative process and the incredible visual quality of images it produces. However, on finding that his student loan didn’t stretch to the several thousand pounds it can cost to buy a camera, he started experimenting with building one himself.

he says. “That’s great if you’ve got the money to pay for it. We got rid of all the unnecessary over-engineered and overpolished parts and provided a camera that does exactly what you need.” Made from birch plywood, the camera is also the lightest 4×5 camera out there which makes it ideal for landscape photographers and others working out in the field.

“Because it’s so slow and you’ll only have a couple of sheets of film with you, you have to really consider the shot you’re going to take. There’s a huge risk of messing it all up and coming away with nothing, so you wait for the moment to take the perfect shot and by doing that you find yourself noticing more things and feeling immersed in what’s going on.” And the results of shooting large-format are magnificent. “The quality of a sheet of 8×10 film is the equivalent of 480 mega pixels,” points out Grew. “It can capture this incredible range of light and presents it back to you in the way it would appear if you were there in the natural environment, rather than it being synthesised digitally. That gives it a certain aesthetic and feeling.” Intrepid works closely with photographers,

But, he adds “what’s really nice is when you get an email saying thank you, I’ve never had access to a large-format camera before you were around.”

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“The reason we’re designing the 8×10 is the same as the 4×5 – it’s a camera people want to use but can’t always get their hands on,” he continues. “And there are lots of talented photographers who could do really amazing things with it so we thought we’d step in and change that.”

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testing and soliciting feedback throughout the design and manufacture process. “Because we do all the design in-house, if someone comes up with a change we can implement it and incrementally it gets better and better. It means the community has a direct feed into how we’re doing things.”

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â&#x20AC;&#x201C;end.