"Coming To A New Negative Was Like Coming To A New Mystery": The Film Mystique

I noticed at the Sausalito Art Festival that more than one photographer was marketing—as a positive attribute—their exclusive use of "wet" techniques (that is to say, traditional photographic chemical processing) as if this conferred upon their photos some kind of special attribute.

Aside from my doubt that this is a particularly effective marketing strategy, in fact I don’t see any significant advantage in using film. I myself don’t use film any more as a practical matter: the advantages of digital cameras are all too evident for me to indulge in sloppy sentimentality. Yes, digital images are different, but in fact they have their own seductive look.

Whatever. However, in scanning some older negatives taken in 1966 for my recent Japan series I came once again to the quite interesting topic of the mystique of film. Simply put, when I hold one of those negatives in my hand I am establishing a direct physical connection to the past. I’m reminded of this passage from Ransome Scott’s mystery novel, Muerte Con Queso:

The film I had exposed that day now lay in neat rows of developed and cut negatives before me. I experienced, once again, the realization that my negatives were like little time machines: they represented a direct connection to the past. I had been there at the Buena Vista Estates, and so had they. Just what had I taken that day that was so valuable?

Each roll of film—in this case, Tri-X—consisted of 36 negatives. I had trimmed the rolls into 6 strips of 6 negatives each. I now laid the first roll’s strips in order onto a piece of white cardboard and turned off the overhead light, letting my eyes adjust to the dim orange glow of the safelights. I had made so many contact prints that my actions were automatic, like shifting the gears on a car. But I was thinking: thinking about my negatives. In many ways, coming to a new negative was like coming to a new mystery.

I guess that’s the point—the negatives sitting up there on a shelf now filed away in glassine envelopes were once part of a roll of film inside my Nikon F; the same Nikon F that I held in June, 1966 as I walked through Kyoto and encountered a lady chasing a cat.

The Nikon F is long gone; and digital files . . . well, digital files: they exist in an odd kind of suspended animation on my hard drive, definitely ungraspable. But the negatives remain.

Come to think of it, maybe it is a form of sloppy sentimentality, as Colin Fletcher once remarked of his reluctance to discard old hiking staffs.

Photo: Negatives—Marin County, 2008