Defects become desirable

Our photographer is bemused by modern efforts to re-create, digitally, two of the least desirable qualities of fast film: high contrast and large grain. But the paradox of limitations and defects becoming highly sought-after features is not new, and is as widespread as ripped jeans.

Our photographer writes:
In this age after the final victory of the digital camera it’s interesting to see what people are doing with the expanded capabilities of the medium. Some of them are actively seeking to make digital photographs look like film photographs from days of yore. This is not in principle very hard, with the extreme flexibility of Photoshop and its like. But sometimes it must be either tricky or hard to do well, because a few modern photographers have taken the extreme step of buying film cameras to re-create the high-contrast, large-grain look of newspaper photojournalism.

Grain, in analog photography, means the tiny clumps of dark material that make up the picture. How big the clumps are determines how small an object the picture will show; in that way it’s like pixel size, though in other ways it behaves rather differently. High contrast means that small differences in brightness in the scene are made larger (and shadows become impenetrably dark, highlights blank white). Each different sort of film was (and is) a chemical compromise among these and other features, notably speed. Getting high speed, necessary for much newspaper work in badly-lit places and at night, generally meant large grain and high contrast. This led to a certain look of “gritty realism” being associated with subjects like crime and urban decay.

Now, this look is not necessarily more realistic than something smoother (see the work of, say, Vivian Meier). Indeed, for decades the alchemists at Kodak, Ilford, Fuji and elsewhere fought to reduce the grain and retain the tonality while holding on to high sensitivity, with some success. But “gritty realism” became a genre of its own and there’s nothing we can do about it now. Photographers, artists, those with a certain visual idea use it to get that idea across.

Note the paradox: what was an unavoidable limitation in film, no longer a problem with digital cameras, is now deliberately sought.

In a way, it reminds me of blue jeans. In the very old days jeans were work clothes, inexpensive and hard-wearing. One got them new, dark blue and about as soft as cardboard. It took time and effort and wearing them a lot, but eventually they were sky-blue and incredibly comfortable. If you were lucky this happened before you ripped out the knees and had to turn them into cutoffs. But a recent fashion has soft jeans pre-ripped, and in places no natural wear could possibly put them. We would have considered them ruined. (Pre-softened jeans with wear of some sort already in place, of course, appeared long ago.)

There are other examples, and not only in art and fashion. There’s nothing wrong with taking a defect and turning it into a desirable feature; it’s just paradoxical, and quite human.