Familiar Friends in a Strange land

This has been a very interesting week.

Some recent TV series have taken people from ‘today’ and they find themselves in the same life and occupation, but twenty five years ago.

For me it is more like the Woody Allen film ‘Sleeper’, for 25 years I have been immersed in bringing up my family in France and renovating and building monumental medieval ruins to make a home and business – you can see the results of these efforts in Villa Roquette. The many years of photography and filming I did in the UK has been displaced by cement mixing and bricklaying.

So this week I feel I have landed in a parallel universe.

Picking up where I left off in photography is a wondrous experience – nothing is the same, yet nothing has changed. What I mean is, the materials, equipment and processes I was immersed in, taught and practiced for 25 years has either vanished or seems to be relegated to museums, but the values, discussions and images are exactly those I was familiar with.

In 1981 I asked, when will digital photography equal the quality, price and portability of photographs made with chemistry – I had worked with digital backs on large format studio cameras and a little with the first Mavica camera. But then came to live in France, stopped and spent my time putting stuff into cement mixers;

This week has been like waking up from a long sleep – I can now go back to planning the photographic workshops I intended to run in 1991. So to do this I have dusted off my archives and equipment (literally) and have been studying. Apart from learning one new word – Bokeh – nothing much is new – plenty of changes – Kodachome and Portriga have vanished, along with thousands of other products – Ilford is a silver shadow of it’s past glory and Polaroid have the slowest website in the world and not a mention of ‘Polaroids’, they still offer instant images though.

Of course digital photography is now the standard – a small to medium format digital camera can produce results as good (and in most cases better for purpose) than an equivalent chemical dinosaur.

However the teaching of photography and the sciences and physics are all the same (except for the us of the word bokeh in a circular confusing way) – chemistry is no longer relevant ) – yet – there does seem to be a hankering after silver/gelatin images, not just in my latent memory.

I am writing up course notes for my new series of photographic workshops – I started this with a completely clean sheet and have not referred to the teaching notes I had for students I taught over 30 years ago – I found, that after only one day, I am hardly mentioning silver/gelatin at all and it is clear to me that I will be teaching how to achieve a good print from an ink printer fed digital information.

But – I realise that I have a great deal to share and to teach others in my Emmaus experience. In seeing the light through cmos rather than halides, I am closer to a vision undiluted by a quarter of a century of jargon, yet disciplined by a preceding 25 years of darkroom practice.

I can’t wait to see what the next week brings me in the discovery of my old craft – Brobdingnag or Yahoo – ?