Film or digital? And does it matter?

As I’ve been ill since the beginning of June, I’ve been unable to shoot and unable to print in the darkroom. So I spent my spare time re-reading some of my very favorite references on photography:

• Issue 83 of Lenswork magazine (July-August 2009), a tribute to photographer Bill Jay;
• On Being a Photographer by Bill Jay and David Hurn;
• Single Exposures – Random Observations on Photography, Art, and Creativity by Brooks Jensen;
• Within the Frame by David duChemin; and
• VisionMongers – Making a Life and a Living in Photography, also by David duChemin.

I also went through some older issues of Lenswork magazine and re-read an editorial by Brooks Jensen from Issue 85 (Nov-Dec 2009) entitled “A Case of Mistaken Identity”.

In this editorial, Brooks Jensen makes a point about one’s identity as an artist being defined by certain influences, some of which are internal and some are external. The case in point concerns the tiresome film vs. digital debate:

Those of us who, like myself, defined ourselves with a certain style of photography using a prescribed kind of equipment found that we were challenged by the new technologies. For example, we knew that only large-format photography could produce grainless results, sharp as a tack, like those of our heroes Adams, Weston, et al. But when we started seeing grainless, tack-sharp images from digital cameras, it wasn’t that our equipment was being challenged, but rather our sense of identity was being threatened. A digital upstart could be a fine art photographer and produce work that successfully competed with ours with having to undergo our special initiations (workshops, Zone system testing, years of struggling in the darkroom). It wasn’t a problem for us that other people were making good images, but rather that they were making good images without having to be a member of our tribe. This made our tribe vulnerable; it challenged not what/how we produce, but who we are.

This sense of identity is what the Burlington Photo Art Group, to which I belong, has struggled with to some extent over the past year, and will continue to struggle with as more and more photographers abandon analog photography.

My passion continues to be black-and-white landscape and portrait photography. My preference is to work with film – I enjoy everything about using film and developing it, and my prints, in a traditional wet darkroom. On the other hand, I am slowly becoming equally at home with digital – four of my most recent portraiture projects have all been digital, by requirement.

For BPAG, perhaps the time has come to consider an identity based on black-and-white fine art photography, rather than the tools with which we make those images.