Monomorphic

One of my recent interests has been film photography. Of course, I was interested in exploring the difference between digital and analog technology, and having taken more than my share of smartphone pictures in my life, I was ready to jump to the opposite end of the spectrum. It also helps that Japan has an excellent second-hand market for vintage cameras and lenses. Some manual focus lenses made here in the 1970s and 1980s are still considered excellent performers with today’s latest “mirrorless” digital cameras.

I have been surprised by the richness of this activity. Film photography forces a higher level of consciousness than the easy point and click photography of smartphones, which must now be almost as automatic as breathing for many. With film, it is necessary to compose the shot, consider, and then wait for the result. Of course, there will be no previews until the film has been processed. Not only am I forced to think more about the shots, I’m also forced to consider what photography is, becoming aware of myself as someone who observes and records.

Susan Sontag has argued clearly enough that photography is not objective truth. Unless some kind of scientific attitude is applied, there is too much framing, selection and cherry-picking. But photography is maybe the art form that most convincingly makes the claim to being objective truth. A phenomenology of photography, the taking of photos and their viewing, would be something rich and complex. For me as a photographer, photography is almost a pure exploration of the psyche and of my own reaction to subjects. Other people viewing my photographs would, I expect, usually discover a completely different meaning than the one I have already attached to them.

Truth and meaning-considerations aside, impressions of the physical world are on some level captured in photographs, digital as well as analog. Photography exemplifies several ways of relating to particularity through instruments and attitudes. Digital photography imposes a final alphabet and ground level of measurements, and a digital image is thus effectively a number in a very large integer space. Film photography impresses the image upon silver halide crystals, which are not homogenous, not square-shaped, and whose physical properties may or may not have been fully elucidated. In some sense the ground of film photography may be said to be open in a way that digital photography is not. For all that, of course, in 2018 digital photography may be the quickest and most practical way to get sharp and high quality images, by most people’s common sense standards. But it is hard to suppress the feeling that something must be lacking there, that we tend to make the leap too easily and quickly.