The Basement

Someday we’ll all be shooting digital video and grabing frames from our constant documentation of what’s in front of us. Personally I don’t find this vision of the future so compelling. There’s just something that seems so different about the decision to capture a particular moment at the time versus doing so somewhere after the fact. Maybe I’ll be the last still photographer going.

Somewhere along the line the notion of a photograph has been corrupted, usurped by the mass attention deficit disorder that’s infected our collective society. Everything’s ephemeral, designed and produced to be consumed in gigantic quatities at rates that defy contemplation or reflection or possibly even comprehension on anything but a base level. This is not my photography.

A black and white photographer at heart. Is it the abstraction of black and white that draws me in? Merely some artiface or effect? The romance of darkroom toils from my youth? Possibly the magic I felt conveyed in the first photographs that induced wonder beyond words made by kindred spirits? All of it? I like to think it’s of the clarifying nature of the medium. The stripping away of all superfluous.

Even within the narrow succinct medium that is black & white I have an even narrower affinity of sorts. There’s an immediacy, a feeling, a special relation ship to a particular format, that of 35mm roll film. Everything from the number thirty-six embedded in my brain to the feel and smell of a fresh roll. The tactile response of the advance to the next frame and it’s infinite possiblities. Even the notion of indelibly recording of that moment chemically engraved into silver halaides. The latent image. That three by two ratio of plastic that was actually present, with me during the moment shared.

At somepoint all of this won’t even be a notion in anyone’s head let alone a viable visual medium for mass consumption. Until that point I’ll make the best of it. Without the artiface, without the polish and gleam of the hyper-real hyper-clarity of cyber-compositied-corrected-warped-straitened-corrected eye-popping saturation with all the fulfillment of a bag of Funyuns. Count me out, call me obsolete. I’ll soldier on until the very end.

RB