Missing the Analog Point

For the last couple of days, I’ve been enjoying Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan. It is a story about the most famous photographer of the American Indian in our history. But it is also a story about a man and his art, photography, at the beginning of that technology. When I was a kid, for a little while I was a photography geek in school. I had a few cameras, stuff that I’d found in pawn shops, from 120/620 Kodak film and a huge and beat-up Kodak Vollenda expandable camera to assorted low cost 35mm cameras. I wasn’t particularly good with the cameras (no change from today), but I was fascinated with the developing process and was fairly competent at that for a while. Music drug me away from photography pretty quickly and until digital cameras made taking pictures easy and cheap I pretty much gave up the habit.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher has a lot of detailed descriptions of the chemistry and experimental quality of the developing process that reminded me of the analog recording processes and equipment that I grew up working with and wrestled with for more than 40 years. The book made me wonder if modern analog camera fans are as clueless about the technology they use as are modern analog recording freaks? Edward Curtis was a wizard in the darkroom, creating his own developing emulsions, processes, and creating effects with chemicals, development time and temperatures, and other techniques. His gallery in McCloud, California is a national treasure as was his art. Most modern analog photographers bypass the darkroom, for good reason. The chemicals are often toxic, at best, and the processes are tedious, hazardous, and unpredictable. Sending your roll of film into a company that owns and maintains the automated processing equipment is the surest, easiest, safest way to get pictures developed. It also eliminates at least half of the art of being a photographer.

The analog recording process, at its best, is a similar mess of technologies, lots of subjective judgement, experience, tedious technologies that require constant (expensive) maintenance, and ridiculous quantities of patience. Like analog photography, the results of all of those qualities can be emulated relatively simply and predictably with digital technologies with little-to-no downside. I am not saying that those emulations are perfect and I am absolutely not arguing that an analog master can not do things in that format that might be impossible to duplicate in the digital world. I am saying that if you aren’t a master of the technology, you’re probably bullshitting yourself if you think plowing money into obsolete equipment and media is going to magically buy you something you couldn’t do better with digital equipment.