A Brief Rant About Film

A Photographer Inveighs Against Conventional Wisdom

Regrettably, there is a widely-held notion today 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 an effortless pursuit; just another quotidian activity automated by technology to subordinate human decision-making. Legions among this cohort compulsively take picture after picture, hoarding them, 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 after 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. Our visually-preserved memories, once precious, carefully curated and displayed, now languish in a virtual vault that is less frequently visited than that proverbial shoebox forgotten in a dark closet. It’s now called “the cloud.” And we are continually nickel-and-dimed by Apple, Google, and Dropbox, dunning us to pay for ever-increasing gigabytes of ephemeral storage space for our abandoned pictures. This phenomenon comes at the expense, I think, of our eidetic memories, the deeply embedded kind that we hold…