It was announced recently that Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. They are re-organizing, but there are other film companies that have disappeared like Polaroid, Agfa, Ilford and Konica. I always get a little nostalgic when I hear these stories because I grew up wanting to shoot film, making my own darkroom in a bedroom closet and poring over film magazines and books, trying to learn the mystery of making images on sheets of plastic and chemicals. I once caused my whole family to run from the house because I poured stop bath, a highly concentrated form of acetic acid, directly into a developing tray without diluting it. Oops. You should really read the directions when playing with chemicals in a closet.
The footage above is from a 1922 Kodachrome film test. It is eerie and ghostlike with the flickering light and the tentative models giving us their best sensual gazes. The gestures and facial expressions of the models are definitely from a different era, but if you take away the period clothing, there is a sense of that could be me up there in the future a kind of "we too will someday be a faded image on a screen."
Looking at dead or dying technology always makes me think, "What next?" (Along with twinges of nostalgia for my youth and lost hair) How will my children watch images of me? Will they even be able to? Will technology advance so quickly and change so radically that we won't even be able to access the old technology or will it all be absorbed into some kind of "super-cloud" network where any image, any moving image throughout history will be stored and accessible by everyone?
The SOPA Act and the protests yesterday are important because if we let corporations or governments take away our right to access the past, to access images, ideas, stories because part of those images or stories might have "property" belonging to a corporation, we will then be letting the corporations tell our stories for us. We could lose the boundless creativity that comes from open access to images and ideas. We could lose our stories of who we are, where we've been, what we've done.
Although I love film and its processes and chemicals and messiness and feeling and "there-ness", I don't love it's expense and the amount of time it takes to produce a finished product. I'm looking forward to seeing where we go next and I wonder what my son will be looking at and thinking, "Wow, that was the beginning of that technology, how crude that was, look at how far we've come!"
The Lytro camera is an interesting emerging technology that uses a sensor to capture the light field in front of it with no focusing. You focus the image after it has been taken. It has an 8x optical zoom and f2 constant aperture. It looks like an old slide viewer with a square aspect ratio. Will it take hold? When will it be available? Check out this video http://bit.ly/qBtc4a or visit http://www.lytro.com I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just find the camera fascinating.
