Bridging the photographic divide(Photo: Thinkstock)
Photography had already been invented when the Old Homestead Steakhouse opened in Manhattan's meatpacking district in 1868. But no one had seen anything like the camera being passed around by diners in 1995. People rose from their tables attracted by its bright, color screen and ability to play back its 96 snapshots instantly.
The Casio QV-10 was in a category by itself as the holiday shopping season approached 20 years ago. It wasn't the first digital camera. But until then images had to be transferred to a computer to be seen. Within a few years, hundreds of models from leisure point-and-shoots to pro digital SLRs inundated the market, all with in-camera view screens for composing and reviewing pictures.
In a world of instant gratification, film photography's death dive was assured. Beyond turning the screen into the photographer's center of attention, the QV-10 had another feature that would be duplicated by other camera manufacturers. The lens housing rotated, enabling shutterbugs to frame themselves in the 1.8-inch liquid-crystal display. People started taking selfies a decade before the term was coined.
Most American families owned at least one film camera in the second half of the 20th century, and an entire industry of craftsmen built their livelihoods around the taking and processing of film, slides and prints. Few activities in the analog-to-digital transformation have touched so many people as much as the switch from chemical to digital photography.
To see how much things have changed, I visited the PhotoPlus Expo this fall in New York. Out of 225 exhibitors on the floor, only 12 came up on the show's website under the category of film products + photographic paper/darkroom supplies. One of them was FilmToaster Photography, which makes accessories for digitizing multiple film formats.
FilmToaster creator Cecil Williams began taking pictures in 1946 when he was 9 years old. He later photographed the civil rights movement for publications like Jet. Williams says he came up with the FilmToaster to help him and others preserve African-American history.
"Before digital cameras appeared in the mid-1990s, generations of photographers like myself invested talent, time<span style="color: Red;">*</span>and resources creating billions of images on various-size roll and sheet film," he explained. "I invented the FilmToaster as the ultimate accessory bridging 20th-century film and 21st-century digital. Because analog technology including film and equipment declines and fades with age, transferring film images into a digital format is no longer a choice — it is an inevitable necessity."
Perhaps no one has more thoroughly chronicled the disruption of film-based photographers than Harvey Wang, author of the new book From Darkroom to Daylight. Distilling the input from 35 professional photographers he interviewed, Wang concludes that the greatest loss resulting from the digital revolution "is the craft of photography as an entire generation of practitioners understood it."
At the same time, Wang says, the most profound gains from the analog-to-digital shift are "the ubiquity of cameras and the ability to share and transmit images quickly. They've thoroughly democratized photography."
Still, Wang strikes a note of caution based on an experience he had cleaning out his mother's house after she passed away. "I found albums and boxes of photographs from her past including photographs of the 1939 World's Fair where she met my father. No one had touched them for at least 50 years. I don't think the next generation will be able to plug in a hard drive they find in a basement 50 years from now and recover that history, at least not easily."
Because file formats change and hardware becomes obsolete, Wang advises that at the end of every year people should print a selection of their best and most consequential pictures and put them in a physical album that will be accessible to and by future generations.
The accompanying chart compares some subtleties of the two photographic eras.
HOW OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH PHOTOGRAPHY HAS CHANGED<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
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