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Publications, Press & Video Wasatch
Rambler: Sometimes the old ways are the best ways -- get the picture?
Sun,
Nov 7, 2004 My own family is deserting me. My sister just bought her husband a digital camera for his birthday. My brother, the former commercial photographer, uses one to gather images for his new painting career. I even bought one to take pictures of junk I sell on eBay. What do I sell? Old cameras. Want one? So I'm not a complete Luddite (Ned Ludd is the guy who busted up early weaving machinery because it was putting people out of work) but it is rare that I find myself feeling modern, either. Such was the case, however, when I was invited to a workshop to watch Quinn Jacobson out in Riverdale do his version of wet-plate collodion photography, a system that would have warmed the cockles of Ned Ludd's heart. Becky Wright's excellent article on Quinn's work Sept. 19 told a lot about what he does, but it was fascinating to see it in person. It is a process that was made deservedly "obsolete" more than 150 years ago. Why deservedly? Because you pretty much hand-make your picture, using chemicals that can kill you. For the process to be any more tedious you'd have to draw your image by hand. We stood in Quinn's garage and watched him slowly pour collodion (a kind of base) onto a sheet of glass, let it harden, put it in silver nitrate, put it in a camera, then tell someone "Don't move for 20 seconds!" while he took the picture. All the while Quinn got more and more excited, speculating that "this time we'll get a nice image," and "this is really good light." It was a lot of fiddling around with stuff, but it was clear that it was that fiddling, that sweating, that precision, as much as the end result, that sparked his plug. Sometimes the images were good, sometimes they weren't. We spent three hours and he ended up with one he liked, which isn't bad as these things go. Why does he do it? There's no substitute, that's why. His 150-year-old lens sees things modern ones don't, precisely because it is ancient. I use 50-year-old lenses for the same reason. Modern lenses are too good. But more, his ancient-style "film" captures things my modern film barely touches and that pixels can only dream of. For the technology wonks in the audience, one of his 5-by-7-inch plates probably has several terabytes of information on it. To view one is like looking into someone's soul. I watched. I was amazed. When it was done I went home, souped the film I'd shot, and got a bit cocky as I admired the 72 still-wet "modern" negatives I'd whipped out in 15 minutes. But then I realized it might take hours, days, in the darkroom before I come up with one print from that mess I really like, one print that really says something, that shows what I hoped it would. And even then it wouldn't match what Quinn was making. Where does this leave us? If all you want is scads of perfectly fine pictures, digital does a nice job. So does film. If you want one single amazing image to capture and show the heart and soul of someone, be ready to spend some time, no matter what you are using. In this regard, people like Quinn may be on the leading edge.
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