Working manually

How much of your work is your own?

After a hiatus of some months, our photographer is once again developing his own film.  The process involves loading the roll into a small tank, then pouring a precise sequence of chemicals in and out for carefully regulated periods.  It always seems a little magical when he finally unrolls a set of actual pictures into the light; there is no feedback, no indication that he’s done anything right until the film is hung to dry.  (In the shower, as shown here; not only is it a convenient place for something that drips, it’s generally free of dust.)

It’s not magic, of course.  The temperatures, times, chemicals, sequence of actions, each has been developed over years of experiment.  No one would have put them together all at once.  Indeed, sometimes it seems there’s little relation between the slick precision of today and the rough experimentation of the early years.  The chemicals and procedures appear to have no connection.  But the evolution of analog photography can be traced, step by step.

Silver chloride darkens on exposure to light: that was the starting point.  The breakthrough came when a way was found to stop it darkening, to halt the chemical reaction partway.  A few other chemicals have similar light-sensitive behavior.  There are, similarly, choices for the fixer, the chemical that halts the reaction.  And, over the years, people found many ways to hold the chemicals in place to form an image: soaking them into paper, coating a glass plate with a liquid layer, then with a dry layer, then using a flexible plastic film to hold them.

The materials our photographer uses are all provided commercially.  Film and chemicals are manufactured by several companies, even this long after the final victory of digital imaging.  They are cheaper than anything he can make himself, more consistent and much more capable.  But if necessary, he could do his analog photography from scratch.

“And, at one point, we thought we’d have to,” he says.  “The production of analog materials dropped right through the floor, and it looked like all the companies would pack it up.  We’d have to go back to the old nineteenth-century books, telling how to purify and mix your own chemicals, how to get a good coating on a glass plate made for another use.  Film photography would be back in the hands of the amateur chemists.  Where it started.”

Indeed, the old methods have never quite gone away.  There are still photographers who use superseded processes: salted paper, cyanotype, albumen.  (A few even make daguerrotypes; but our photographer looked into it, noticed the boiling mercury and bromine, and decided that was not the process for him.)  So if all the analog photography companies disappeared, most analog photographers would be forced into digital.  But not all.

Digital photography is far more capable, much easier, more versatile.  There’s no reason for most people to do anything else.  But almost no one could write their own software, much less make their own detector, camera or computer.  Our photographer finds something satisfying in a manual process.