My father had a Nikkormat. A silver, heavy, professional-looking camera. And it did its job so well that it allowed him to pass as a journalism photographer to enter the set of Siempre en Domingo and take very close photos of Olivia Newton-John.
With that same camera, he captured trips, family events, my mother, my mother with me inside, me. His stars, his family, his family were his stars.
With the advent of digital and the discomforts of age, Dad stopped taking photos with that camera. Now he does everything with his phone if he remembers. But it's not the same. With that phone, he couldn't pass as a journalist to take photos of Olivia, first of all, because Olivia is dead. Second, while the smartphone has democratized photography to a certain extent, it doesn't mean it has democratized the profession of photographer. On the contrary, it has made it much more distant. The expensive DSLR, the contacts in the media, the guild badge, the possibility of finding (or not) your portfolio on your website and in digital publications. Your presence on social media. A disarming "dude, I don't even run into you."
Furthermore, without the composition skills and those imperfections of the moment, the results are all the same. Even when corrected with filters. Especially when corrected with filters. I know, the important thing is not the medium, but the message. But when the medium becomes so monotonous, so soulless, the message dilutes. The gravitas of the moment lightens.
I'm considering taking fewer photos with my phone. Even those that tell stories and record time. What's the point of doing it, if then time and history end up merging into the same plane? There was a time in university when I was into lomographic cameras. Much more lo-fi than my father's Nikkormat. The security guards at Televisa would have made fun of me, and I wouldn't have cared. Holga, Fisheye, the concept of "shoot from the hip" of photographing the moment in an improvised way and without any expectations. It was fun, but it was just a fad.
Above all, developing film is more difficult and expensive than it used to be. My former university doesn’t have a film developing space anymore, partly perhaps because students were doing "unholy things" in the darkroom, but also because, with the new art and design building, they saw it necessary to move at the pace of progress. A progress that dries up rivers, sets forests on fire, and covers beaches in snow.
It's curious, but that same progress largely left analogue photography behind because of its imperfections and spontaneity, yet now there are editing filters that promise to give those imperfections and spontaneity to your face-tuned smartphone images.
Brian Eno writes in his diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart.
The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
I'm thinking of returning to something more ceremonial and dusting off my small portable digital Nikon. Or was it Canon? Neither sponsors me. That Y2K excitement of taking out your little camera from your bag, backpack, or knapsack, turning on the button, taking photos of your friends, your surroundings, yourself, seeing them on the little screen without any distractions, and then organizing them by folder, giving them names and dates, saving them on your computer, and printing the ones you like the most. I could go back to the DSLR, but it's too bulky, I don't have that much self-esteem, and it's not like I'm going to take photos of Olivia Newton-John.
Byung-Chul Han has a small, incisive, perfect essay about how the acceleration of the digital, or rather, of instant digital, destroys narrative.
Barthes, in his study of photography, Camera Lucida, quotes Kafka: "My stories are something like closing one's eyes." And he observes in this regard: "Photography must be silent. This is not a question of 'discretion,' but of music. Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state of silence, of effort for silence (closing one's eyes means making the image speak in silence)."
[...]
Current digital images lack silence—and, therefore, lack music, and even scent. Scent, too, is a form of conclusion. Images without silence do not speak or narrate; they make noise.
Faced with these "buzzing" images, one cannot close one's eyes. Closed eyes draw the conclusion. Today, perception is incapable of conclusion, as it zaps through an endless digital network. The rapid change of images makes it impossible to close one's eyes, as this presupposes contemplative delay. Images today are constructed in such a way that it is not possible to close one's eyes.
I want to close my eyes. Or at least what comes next. Half-close them.