Enjoying Analogue Photography
Unrelated Photo of Cold Weather #1
One of the joys of analogue photography is that you rarely know what you’ve done wrong until long after the picture has been taken. No matter how rigorous your procedures, analogue always remains a bit dodgy. Film gets loaded wrong. Developer goes bad. Negatives get scratched. Etc. Etc. Etc. Of all the things that can go wrong, few of them are detectable at the moment you take the picture, leaving you free to enjoy the act of snapping the shutter.
Unrelated Photo of Cold Weather #2
This thought came to me yesterday while I was walking around in 30 MPH winds with freezing fingers and ears, practically giggling to myself as I snapped pictures of the freezing rain blowing across the fields. Work had taken me out to the far edge of campus, where all mid-western colleges turn into farm stations. The weather had turned from a sticky, foggy 60 F to a windy, nasty 30 F in just a few hours. The fog was freezing. Visibility was low. And the dirt road lined with telephones polls was suddenly a thing of beauty. So too the frosty fields and the wind itself. I couldn’t help borrowing a few minutes from the State of Illinois to quickly shoot half a roll (I’ll come in early some morning later this week to make it up to them).
Unrelated Photo of Cold Weather #3
I have no idea if the pictures are any good, and I won’t know until I get a chance to develop the roll this weekend. Until then, I’m content to believe they turned out gorgeous. Who says photography is just about results?
Matt, I’m enjoying YOUR analog photography! I have not developed a roll of film in almost thirty years. The enjoyment is in doing once own lab work, not sending to the photo finishers. Keep up the good work.
I think your last sentence sums things up nicely… Photography is just as much about ‘being there’ as anything else. This is the part of the experience that is the most difficult to pass on to a viewer unfortunately…
Bob, yeah, it’s not the same if you send the film out.
John, I’m slowly coming to think that it’s possible for the photographer to get something entirely different out of photography than the viewer gets, and for both parties to be ‘right’.
Watch out, Matt, you’re getting dangerously close to opening a discussion on authorial intention-based criticism vs. reader-response criticism. Didn’t we revoke your English lit. degree more than once? :)
For what it’s worth, all I see in your work is an indictment of the counter-revolutionaries and gangsters arrayed against the Dear Leader.
At this rate you’ll be saying ‘Art is a Verb’ next.
‘Didn’t we revoke your English lit. degree more than once? :)’
Spending six months in any Asian country is enough to get you an ‘ex pat’ stamp on your English major ID card. That and a visit to the spot where Marx & Engels read the Communist Manifesto to Belgian workers makes your lit. crit. degree irrevocable. So does spelling analog ‘analogue,’ BTW.
Colin, heaven help me. ;-)
Folks, I enjoy Matt´s pictures and what he writes about “analogue” photography is much nearer to my feelings about it than anything I have read before. But your comments are way above my English. :)
I can’t help but feel with the timing of this post, that it is almost a shot across my bow to enjoy the act even if I don’t enjoy the results.
Well, you brew beer even if you don’t always enjoy the results, don’t you?
A friend sent me to your site because I have begun shooting film again. I could relate to the idea of almost giggling from the fun of just being out and making pictures.
Steve Williams
Scooter in the Sticks
‘Well, you brew beer even if you don’t always enjoy the results, don’t you?’
True.
[...] Matt Alofs had this interesting post on the joys of analog photography. Something I hadn’t considered. [...]
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