A Brief Rant About Film

A Photographer Inveighs Against Conventional Wisdom

Regrettably, there seems to be a widely-held notion these days that photography is no big deal. After all, everybody’s got a camera.

A generation has come of age with the internet and the iPhone that sees photography as a seamless and effortless pursuit, just another quotidian activity automated by technology to subordinate human decision-making. Maybe we can exclude pro photographers from that reflection, but legions of people compulsively take picture after picture, hoarding them in profusion, never to be looked at again after their first appearance on a tiny screen.

As a society we once cherished the “Kodak Moment,” a marketing masterstroke, now quaint since falling victim to — I’ll coin a new word — photobesity, a mind-boggling deluge of desultory snapshots created with such careless frequency that they’ve devolved into yottabytes of digital dross. Visually-preserved memories, once precious, carefully curated and displayed, now languish in a virtual vault that is less frequently visited than that proverbial shoebox full of family vacation photos forgotten in a dark closet. It’s now called “the cloud.” And we are continually nickel-and-dimed by Apple, Google, and Dropbox, alternatively dunning us or surreptitiously renewing our subscriptions to pay for…