The economics of obsolescence

Anyone want a high-end enlarger?

A recent post on a photographer’s blog that we follow brought up the subject of enlargers.  In the days of film photography, the enlarger was an apparatus to project an image of one’s negative on the sensitive paper below.  It was required to make a reasonably-sized print of most negatives, and before the digital age a print was necessary to actually view one’s pictures.

[These statements need qualification.  Large-format cameras used negatives of four-by-five inches in size or bigger, and for these one could lay the negative directly on the paper with no enlarger needed.  One could also do such “contact prints” of small negatives, like the ubiquitous 35mm; the images were tiny, but generally good enough to pick out the ones you wanted to enlarge.  And for transparencies, slides, one generally did not make a print but showed them on a wall or curtain using a slide projector.  Enlarged prints, however, were how most people used most photographs.]

So there were a lot of enlargers in use.  They ranged from the very basic plastic models, adequate for some purposes, to absolutely exquisite examples of the finest optical and mechanical engineering.  The latter were not cheap.  A knowledgeable working photographer would buy the best he could afford, or go maybe a little higher, and save up for years if necessary.

Well, with a very few exceptions, that’s all gone now.  Digital printing (in the right hands) is much more capable than any wet-darkroom technique, and in any case is much easier to do.  There’s no need for a separate room with running water and the careful control of stray light.  And while there is still a market for film cameras among the nostalgic or the neo-nostalgic, very few current film photographers are willing to invest the time and effort required to operate a darkroom.  So we have the situation of many fine examples of opto-mechanical engineering lying around unused, and destined for the landfill.  It would horrify a photographer of the old days to see a Leica thrown away, but that’s what we’re facing.  You can’t sell it if no one’s buying.

Our astronomer mentions a sort of parallel situation.  In the early and mid-nineteenth century telescopes were used for visual observing, and so were optimized for the human eye.  This meant physically long instruments with optics matched to human characteristics.  There was even something of a competition among countries and cities for large telescopes of the best quality (and rather less attention paid to site selection or setting out a useful observing program).  But when photography became an important tool the old telescopes were less useful.  The early emulsions especially used a different part of the spectrum from that of the human eye, so the old lenses were not so good at it; and in any case shorter focal lengths were needed.  Some of the old instruments were modified or repurposed, with varying degrees of success, but the new astronomy mostly came from new telescopes.  The superb old visual instruments were no longer useful.

Some are still around, of course, and find their use on public-observing nights, just as some master printers will still make use of the best enlargers.  But we’re afraid most of the latter will just be discarded.