Film, Digital, and Paradoxical Simplicity

One of the allures of film is that in its relative simplicity, there is supposed to be some tighter connection between the scene before the camera and the recorded image. The lens impartially draws on the film, and that’s it (not really, but let’s pretend). This stands in stark contrast to the computational photography creeping steadily into digital capture, particularly in the case of phones. All sorts of digital magic goes on behind the scenes: compositing images, automatic "best" selection, massive distortion correction, post-process background blur. It’s all very complicated, and if you’re of a certain mindset, it reduces the authenticity of the final image. The traditional camera, by contrast, is supposed to be more like a human eye, with its organic lens focusing light onto a retinal film and none of this digital trickery. What could be more perfect, more true, than the very organs with which we see? Would that it were so simple.

Things were simpler, better, before.

The dichotomy that sets the purity of film photography against the artifice of digital capture overlooks the fact that vision itself is a tremendously elaborate and notoriously unreliable example of computational imaging. What we “see” is disturbingly detached from the photons that hit our retinas (retinae?). It's dependent on the way our brains put together flickering nerve impulses as the eyeball saccades around the scene and melds multiple moments with preconceived schemas to form an illusion of continuous, coherent vision.

Consider the classic Harvard study in which subjects watched a video of people passing balls around. As they carefully tracked a ball, half the participants failed to notice the man in a gorilla suit who sauntered across the screen. So much for the reliable fidelity of our built-in cameras.

So the human eye is more an eye-Phone than a classic L-eye-ca (oh yes, I did that). But maybe it's film's divergence from the eye rather than any parallels that justifies our attachment to the impractical and antiquated. Human vision is complex and unreliable. Much like a smartphone, much like the world. And digital photography, which is as much about computers as optics, suffers from the fundamental opacity common to so much modern technology: nobody understands it.

No single body, I mean. As a product of humans, of course “we” understand it. But consider the thousands of minds, the millions of lines of proprietary code, that go into a smartphone. Could any one human really know, end to end, how the thing works? Of course, most people (myself included) don’t fully understand all the optical principles of a multi-element lens or the chemistry of light-sensitive emulsion, but we intuit that with some reading, a substantial but totally human amount of effort, we could. And this lets us feel more in tune with the technology, more aligned with it as we use it. It’s a tool, like a sharp stick, not magic. Magic, despite its appeal, has a dark side. They burned witches, you know. And they burned David Copperfield. Or if they haven’t yet, David, you better watch your back.

Digital natives performing strange rites. The smart ones may one day recognize the poison of convenience, the corruption of algorithms that presume to create an idealized memory of a fictional moment. Whose ideal? Whose moment? Get off my lawn.

Perhaps it's digital technology's transformation into a subjective, active partner in image making that's freshened analog photography's appeal. Digital, having largely achieved the goal of total fidelity that photography has aspired to since its inception, is now trying to out-think us. We want what we remember, or wish we remembered, whether it was there or not. This is how human vision and memory already work, after all -- the perpetual golden hour light of childhood afternoons half-cribbed from old movies, the moment when everyone laughed that never actually happened.

And to some extent, this is what all photography does. The moment of family bliss caught in the frame is what carries forward across the years: the sulking and hair-pulling that bracketed it are allowed to fade. But film, when you understand it, feels more dutiful, more reliable, perhaps more beautiful, with its opto-mechano-chemical process that affords no judgement in the moment. Once the shutter is tripped, a chain of events rooted in the physical world leads to an image hiding in the film emulsion, waiting for developer. It's magic, but it's a small, predictable magic. Nothing you're likely to burn for.    

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

"One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong.
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?"

Simple nomenclature gives the naive answer: we are looking at two cameras and a phone. Two things specifically for taking pictures, and one for doing that and everything else. Two things bumpy with knobs and knurled rings, one as glossy smooth as a eunuch’s freshly shaved pate. Two special-purpose, dedicated devices, and the ultimate info-communicative Swiss Army knife of our age. Two machines rooted in yesterday, and one shaping tomorrow.

But suppose we ask an alien the question. E.T. sees two electronic devices packed with silicon, millions of transistors, powered by lithium-ion batteries, and one spring-driven machine. Two with liquid crystal displays, one with none. All three feature multi-element glass lenses designed to focus light onto a plane, but two put the light on a silicon sensor, while one focuses it on removable photosensitive film. Two self-focus the lenses with motors and feedback algorithms, while the other implements a kind of mechano-optical analog computer (a coupled rangefinder) allowing a user to manually calculate a focus distance. Two record the image on identical electronic chips in compatible file formats, while one relies on photochemical processes to recover a latent image. Two are the products of a space-faring race, one is a relic of planet-bound times.

Of course, classed by purpose, the phone is the odd one out. But in nearly every other way, the mechanical camera is a completely different beast from the kissing cousins of the phone and the digicam. Apart from the design requirement of holding a lens perpendicular to a sensor, the digital camera is a cosmetic homage to its mechanical predecessor, a decorative exterior wrapped around a functional core that is little different from that of the phone.

The superficial similarity between the two cameras helps conceal the truth of the more recent device. The new camera is a substantial consumer investment, but unlike the old camera (and like the phone) it depreciates ferociously. Its resale value will decrease in a stair pattern over several years as newer models are released, until it stops competing with the state-of-the-art and its value gradually sinks to some trivial baseline. If it experiences a fault in this later part of its life, its economic value drops abruptly and permanently to zero because a repair will cost more than the functional camera is worth.

Superficial similarity is what makes half of street photography go 'round. These apparent parallels are rare enough to feel like "finds" and they seem vaguely clever if you don't think about them at all. Note how I turn the "people photographed from behind" trope (evident in something more than half of street photography, I'll wager) and use it to my advantage to erase the subjects' otherwise-distracting individuality. That was totally on purpose.

Historically, obsolete objects have often passed through a trough of zero or negative value before resurfacing as antiques or fetishes of nostalgia. But it’s difficult to see this happening for digital cameras or much of the vast flow of digital detritus we’ve been generating for the last three decades. Apart from a few early, low-production-volume examples of technologies that might accrue collector value, this stuff becomes garbage and will stay garbage. Toxic garbage, cocktails of contaminants waiting to be spilled (examine your digital camera and you’re probably find a “10” circled by arrows, assuring you that all that nastiness will stay locked up for at least 10 years – a whole decade! – before you have to worry about it leaking into the world). These objects, the pinnacle of our production capacity, the most refined technologies we have made, are fundamentally disposable. Their potential functional lives are short, and their actual service lives, before they are replaced by “better” versions, even shorter. Minimizing the delta between those spans maximizes profits for producers and guarantees an ample supply of irreparable junk for the near future.

Locations of Digital Electronics You Own Today in 20 Years

Contrast this with the mechanical camera. Over fifty years old, its value is higher than that of the two-year-old digital camera. Its mythologized brand is partly responsible for this, but only partly: many, many mechanical cameras made from the 1950s to 1970s are worth much more now than digital cameras made ten years ago. And because they are valued and can be practically repaired, there is an ecosystem of skilled craftspeople in place that keeps them working, a virtuous cycle.

“Who gives a fig about the relative values of cameras?” you might say if you’re in a Shakespearean mood. “I just want take pictures!” To which I say, godspeed you happy snapper. None of this has anything to do with photography per se. But as a story of objects, of tools, I find it fascinating. We humans are tool-users and have always been in some way defined by the things we carry. Understanding the nature of those things and when they are not what they appear to be sheds light on ourselves.

The going flavor of consumer capitalism exploits our connection with objects mercilessly: our readiness to identify with and be identified by things, and our susceptibility to the notion that the new thing is better than the old thing, make us easy marks for salesmen. Photography stands out among creative practices for the conspicuous importance of the technologies of its production, so it’s easy to convince people that “better” cameras are better for the practice. Few would argue that “photography” on the whole is “better” now than ten or twenty or fifty years ago, but never mind, it's Black Friday!

Stubborn old cameras and their resilient value suggests that many of us do actually appreciate their relative strengths and the knock-on effects of their birth in a time before short-term obsolescence was a fundament of business plans. Perhaps cultural fatigue with disposable consumerism is building. Perhaps I’m just glorifying another way to purchase identity. I don’t have all the answers. But I like my old camera, in part because I appreciate how little it has in common with my new camera.

The Future of Photography Has No Cameras or Photographers (Part 1)

I'm 39 years old, and I believe I will live to see the death of the camera as we know it today. A 10-year-old granddaughter will open a cupboard without my permission, irritating me, and ask, "What are these?"

I will sigh and say, "Those are cameras."

The insufficiency of this answer will be plain on her face.

"They're for taking pictures," I will add.

And she will look at me, puzzled, because the idea of a hulking thing that takes pictures just won't make sense to a young mind in that far-off year (I'm assuming, as one does, that I'll live to the optimistic side of the actuarial curve).

Today’s digital cameras are descended with astounding directness from the very first boxes with a lens to focus light onto a photo-sensitive surface. The basics were set down in a time before practical electric light, before powered flight, before a 25th territory joined the United States. Along the way it got easier to see what would be in the frame, and now cameras automatically expose and focus under a wide range of lighting conditions, and we don't need to develop film. That’s the 1820s up until the last few years, when cameras (in phones) became networked devices, which just means that nearly everyone on the planet can see our pictures right away. Which is progress, I suppose.

128 years separate these cameras. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. In the distant future archeologists will consider the stratum in which they are buried and marvel at the brief moment of its thinness. The broken camera stratum will overlap slightly with the horse bone stratum, and archeologists may wonder if cameras somehow killed off the once-ubiquitous quadrupeds.

Original Kodak Camera by National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution, CC attribution noncommercial, Nikon D5 by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC attribution

Here's the thing that the camera, in its march towards automation and better image quality, has been studiously ignoring for 200 years: most people don't want to take pictures. They want to have pictures. Of course, by "most people" (as is so often the case) I don't mean you and me. I mean everyone else. People who don't read essays about cameras. Many of them have been deserting the camera market in droves because their phones do a bang-up job of taking pictures, and the younger ones have probably never owned what we’d consider a camera at all. Or a telephone without a camera in it, for that matter.

What's really critical for us, though, is how many of them do still buy real cameras. Yes, they do, in the often mistaken belief that their phone isn't good enough. We depend on them, because there aren't really enough of us to drive a major global industry. But they aren't going to be around for us to kick much longer.

Like many things that can be successfully “predicted,” the agent of change is already here, but in a form that masks its significance. I believe that Google Glass-style augmented reality (AR) will become a thing in my lifetime. The technology will surpass the Google Glass quasi-prototype inflicted on us in 2013, by not being ugly and useless. I don't know exactly how it will work or what it will look like, but an army of beavering engineers (at Google, Apple, or somewhere we haven't heard of yet) will figure it out. Smartphones are already acting as prosthetic memories, and moving artificial intelligence up to eye-level will be the proverbial no-brainer when it can be done practically.

Did you know that Nokia was selling internet-connected phones in the 1990s? A few people loved them, but statistically, no one bought them. They were smart, but only relatively, a revolutionary idea that predated the technology necessary to make it practical (and the constellation of services that would make it desirable). Eventually more device makers piled onto the idea, but none really got it right. Readers of the technology press might remember feverish discussions of "convergence" as companies were trying to blend a pocket computer (then quaintly known as a "personal digital assistant," or PDA) with a cell phone. The results generally stumbled on both fronts, so badly that some industry observers, myself included, wondered what the point was. Why not have a nice little phone, and a nice PDA? Aren't we all men who wear pants with pockets? I was less enlightened and less perceptive back then, and perhaps not coincidentally I routinely wore cargo pants (and cargo shorts).

When the future arrives, it's ugly and doesn't work very well. Technology is a strange race where coming in first place often means becoming a historical footnote. Someone farther back watches the fastest runners cross the finish line, stagger to a stop and look around, panting and confused by the lack of cheering.

Nokia 9110 by Eirik Solheim, CC attribution sharealike, Google Glass by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC attribution (Also known for his stirring portraits of DSLRs -- weird that searching Flickr with unrelated terms, I picked two photos by the same guy.)

The defining consumer technology concept of this young century took off suddenly in 2007 when a maker of portable music players and expensive computers decided to shake the game up. By then I was wearing jeans with restricted pocket real estate, and was ready for the shift. Now only a few nerds and early-adopting business people remember the modern smartphone’s underwhelming, unpromising origins in those Nokia devices of the preceding century.

We're straying from cameras here, but bear with me. Google Glass is the smartphone at the turn of the millennium, looking like a half-baked solution in search of a problem. But our reality will be augmented eventually, because we (a more inclusive "we" that embraces us and them) are lazy and want all the help we can get processing the world, and because we hate to be alone with our thoughts. And the artificial intelligence we currently tap through our phones will need to see what we see in order to understand our needs before we do, which means some kind of imager will see everything we see. And boom, that will be the end of cameras, and of photography, as we know it.

Today we might praise a camera by saying that it functions "as an extension of the eye," but this is only a figure of speech. A true extension of the eye would need to be something that lives on your face, where your eyes are, and where an AR imager will be.

Perhaps, in the very beginnings of the AR moment, our imager might work like the crude camera on the first-gen Google Glass, which took a picture when you pressed a button on the frame or, god help us, said "OK Glass, take a picture" out loud. The engineers will do better than that -- remember, it took a while to figure out the touch screen. In the beginning, miniaturization will probably carry a penalty in terms of image quality, as with early phone cameras. But as happened with phones, the quality will eventually be good enough for most people.

At that point, most people, the huge majority, will never think about cameras again. The consumer market for dedicated cameras will end its long retraction with a final collapse. Today, there are conservatively half-a-dozen international companies competing fiercely for the serious consumer camera market. Some of them might remain in the professional image capture business: people’s everyday AR solution won't be suitable for billboard-sized advertising, and barring a cataclysm with few other upsides, the foreseeable future definitely includes advertising. But the days of deep-pocketed innovation in the consumer camera space will be over. The camera will be a backwater, niche object, perhaps a useful shorthand for indicating an era in fiction, and that is what I mean by the end of cameras as we know them.

This guy wants to be thinking about his camera. He is not like most people.

This is a not, I swear, a cautionary tale. It's prediction, not proscription. If you detect a note of approbation in this essay, it's probably my precocious grumpy-old-man-ness. I am interested in cameras for their own sake, I find the course of their technological development exciting, and I can see from where I'm standing the end of their story as objects that we, as a culture, care about. Boo hoo. I'm not overly worried about humanity lacking objects to care about.

With the collapse of the consumer gear industry, there will be no ads in glossy magazines (probably no magazines at all by that point anyway), no constellation of websites lapping at Amazon's referral fees. The camera fandom we have today, which has little to nothing to do with photography but is still a source of satisfaction and belonging for its members, will cease to exist. Of course, that makes it sound like the rug will be yanked out from under it, as if a revered television series were canceled mid-season, a bustling forum suddenly knocked offline. Indeed, it may feel like that for the few of us who remain, but our upraised voices will be drowned in a sea of indifference. By then a lot of us will be dead, and the rest old, and the people who come after us might understand that cameras were once a thing, and they might not, but the world will have new things on its mind, like stylish personal flotation devices to deal with the rising oceans.

Stay tuned for the next installment, in which I explain how photographers will follow cameras into the void.

Leica: The Unreasonable Choice

I wrote the following over a year ago, before I plunged into the madness.

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Shhhhh. Just look at it.

Why do I want a Leica M film camera? Honestly, I'm asking you, because I can't figure it out. I'm basically a digital native photographer: although I grew up in the last years of film's supremacy, I didn't get seriously into picture making until I bought a Canon digital point-and-shoot in 2004. From there, I followed the familiar camera-DSLR-mirrorless trajectory. At each step, the image quality got better, the cameras got more responsive. Now, with an Olympus OMD E-M10 as my daily driver, I'm far more likely to not see a shot than blow it because the camera couldn't.

And yet. A mechanical Leica. Apparently, now I want a camera that costs money every time I release the shutter, that requires me to focus manually with the camera mashed against my face, not to mention set aperture AND shutter speed on my own (and since I'm looking at fully mechanical bodies, doesn’t even suggest what those settings should be), that needs to be disassembled after taking 36 frames (and forces me, right then, to decide what the ISO will be for the next 36). Also, it's heavier than my current kit. And it costs more. What the hell am I thinking?

Whatever it is, I think it's been percolating for a while. From time to time over the last several years, I've started looking at metal-bodied SLRs on eBay before deciding I was just being silly. I had a lot of fun researching obscure lenses that might work on my NEX 5N (I once blew a whole night learning about Exakta-mount lenses) and I enjoyed using the old Olympus 38mm Pen half-frame lens that I bought from someone in Japan. Sure, it was a great performer above f2, but I really liked the mechanical solidity of it, a dense metal knuckle with a focus ring that felt good against the fingers compared to the plasticy stuff I was used to. I’ve long been interested in what I refer to in my head (though not, generally, out loud) as “knob feel” – the tactility of control surfaces. One of the main reasons I bought the E-M10 over the contemporaneous Panasonic GX7 was knob feel: the Panasonic’s control wheels had an unsatisfying clicky movement that I couldn’t abide. But a fine mechanical camera has knob feel all its own. The knobs and wheels and rings actually do something – they aren’t the disconnected surface of a virtual machine but physically linked to their purpose. This changes the way they feel, both in the fingers and in the mind.

Olympus F. Zuiko Auto-S 38mm f1.8 Pen system lens

So metal. At first it was just for fun. Then just when I needed it. Then I needed it every day.

And speaking of mind, I took a pleasure in that old half-frame lens that was entirely apart from its functional qualities, something more poetic than practical. What light had already passed through its glass? Whose fingers had focused it? Imagining the answers to these questions somehow enriched my experience of using the lens. And what stirs imaginings more than a Leica?

Then there’s the harder-to-admit part. The credence in legend. The illusory connection to a tradition that encompasses some of the greatest practitioners of photography we have known. The ridiculous but irresistible sense of aligning one’s self with genius through the tools used by geniuses. Is there a pathos in this, an admission that I have not produced immortal greatness with the best tools of my day, and so I retreat to tools proven in another age? Well, let’s look out rather than in.

© Henri Cartier-Bresson | Magnum Photos

I have never seen like this. I will never see like this. I fill this sadness with objects.

Then there’s the soft Neo-Luddism that permeates our moment, with our reactionary gaze towards the vintage and authentic. Do I entertain ideas about how digital abundance erodes the thought I put into each frame? Do I harbor fantasies that shooting film will force me to contemplate, slow down, consider, and perhaps see more clearly? Do I imagine that each image will be more precious, will be imbued with some quality that is otherwise sacrificed to digital disposability? I confess, this does seem to be the case.

Now, you might reasonably suggest that there are less torturous ways of dabbling in film and old cameras than joining a cult whose demands are as onerous as Leicaism. And I would retort that, first off, I've tried other mechanical cameras and they didn't do it for me, knob-feel-wise. And second, la la la, I can’t hear you. I don’t want a reasonable camera. I want one that satisfies my unreasonable hungers, that sings silently over the sadnesses of the everyday.