Finding Film in the future
If you google “is film dead” the internet is littered with articles written from the past 25 years about how the resurgence of film is alive and well while others claim it was dead the second the digital sensor was invented. Frankly I’m tired of the debate. Who cares? Do you like film? I do, and I shoot with it, you should too. Do you like digital? Great! do that, I also shoot a lot of digital. Unless there is a reason about your process that is important to the images why make it such a sticking point. I don’t need to know how the sausage is made unless I really need to know. Now that’s out of the way…..
From the perspective of someone who saw the tail end of the true film era I feel I can confidently say film is not dead, but how it gets from negative to positive now a days feels like watching someone mansplain physics to Steven Hawking. Its clumsy, it abandons quality for speed, and it all just looks bad, and has been badly mangled from its original form. I still love a good drum or virtual drum scan, but I will admit it is slow, tedious, and expensive. As soon as the physical machines die it will be gone forever. Its worth holding on to for the moment if you have the means and time, but for everyday photographers it hardly worth it. Flatbed scanners, in my opinion, have always been bad and harsh. I have never really liked them past getting a fast contact sheet. So what to do now?
I sat down with a couple of buddies from school recently and we started talking about what’s the solution? Film isn’t dead! There are a ton of people still shooting it and companies still reviving and making money, but dear lord… what happened to the reverence for the actual celluloid image? Not only do most of the scans from the lab look bad, but people also have the lab throw them out to save on shipping. That is crazy to me. I know its convenient, but man it feels insulting (this is my old man “get off my lawn rant of the day”). I’m hoping that something comes along to fill that virtual drum scan void, and maybe its a copy stand with a nice camera and macro lens, but there is something absolutely crazy about that to me. I do believe this is the direction we are headed in though. I hope whatever it is, I hope it helps people realize the importance of holding on to your physical images.
So now that the future is here, and we are all loosie goosey with our negatives what happens to copyright? Im not a copyright lawyer, and as far as I know you would still own it, but its pretty hard to prove you own the image if the other party is holding the negative and claiming it’s theirs. Separating your image from the physical copyright is problematic to say the least. I do think it could produce an interesting problem in the future though. When these negatives are found and people make art with them, who gets to claim the work? What will happen in the frontier of found negative art? No one will know or have any real ability to find the original artist/photographer. This problem exists now of course, but if all this negative neglect is really happening it should set off an explosion of copyright questions. As someone who likes archival art and photography this could get interesting. I hope if film does ever die its corpse is dug up and reproposed into something amazing. Time will tell.