In Which Chemical Photography Dies And Is Reborn Again

The Rumors of Film's Demise...

by JON EDWARD MILLER

"Why would anyone still shoot film?" is a question I get asked a lot. So when This Recording asked me to write something on film, photography and what we were thinking when we created Funeral Photography, my first reaction was crossover episode, sweet! This is totally going to be like one of those Magnum P.I. guest appearances on Murder She Wrote. 

Funeral Photography discussing our favorite film stocks with This Recording

But then I cringed, Funeral Photography is a photo blog dedicated to the quickly vanishing art of chemical photography. What if TR expected a long tirade against the evils of the new digital imaging with a link to an all vinyl podcast at the bottom? Maybe with a snappy title like "Analog or Death!" To avoid this I want to start by saying that digital photography is awesome. Seriously, I am using all three definitions of awesome at the same time here, not just the colloquial affirmative declaration.  

I do feel a certain pressure to recognize the incredible innovations of digital photography. To ignore it would open the site up to easy dismissal; just a couple film fetishists fighting against an unavoidable future. But if you have delved into the history of photography you'll also know this transition from one photographic recording technique to another, in this case from celluloid to digital sensors, is nothing new. In fact celluloid photography was invented as a cheap, practical and democratic alternative to glass plate photography and was widely decried for creating an inferior image.

Spread chemical emulsion evenly on your iPad to get a similar image, trust me.

Technical innovations in photography have been mothballing their predecessors since the beginning. Just ask Kodak, the inventor of celluloid roll film, which now produces digital cameras and printers. At this point Kodak makes enough money from its chemical patents, medical imaging, etc. that it has already forgotten that you haven’t loaded a roll of film since you took that photo class in high school. 

You like x-rays? So do Kodak shareholders.

The unavoidable truth is that most casual photographers haven’t shot film in almost 10 years. That Polaroid profile pic is from your iPhone’s hipstamatic app.  For the average consumer who wants to take photos of their friends being stupid, post it on the facebook/flickr/tumble/tweet and tag them, this is not bad news.  In fact it has been awesome, but this time only in the colloquial sense.

This photo was taken digitally, need I really say more?

The irony of starting a website dedicated to the film emulsion is not lost on me.  But hey I think blinkers on Amish horse and buggies are the single greatest argument for American exceptionalism.  

Your loss English. 

To clarify, the exact reason that I started this article by singing the praises of digital photography is that Funeral Photography is not trying to launch a Luddite movement against the digital camera, just the opposite.  Funeral Photography is interested in documenting and promoting celluloid’s place in 21st century photography. 

Funeral-Photography building its website, take that technology!

There are dozens of arguments given by film purists, mostly using vague allusions to the “soul” of emulsion or “intangible essence” of film. The other regularly cited explanation is some sort of nostalgia for a “purer”, “truer” photography that the chemical process evokes. I find both of these arguments dubious, although in America’s nostalgia obsessed culture of Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, ESPN Classic and Tea Party activists it’s pretty hard to produce anything without evoking a vague sense of loss for something you never had.

Dr. J making white guys nostalgic for the two-handed bounce pass.

I’m not bold enough to totally deny nostalgia as an influence. But rather than focus on the feel good/feel bad emotional arguments that relegate film photography to the status of model trains and stamp collections; there are three things I would ask people to consider before we declare celluloid film dead.  

The first, and simplest, is that this isn’t an either/or situation. I shoot both digital and film. Putting emotional preferences for or against celluloid aside, while they can be used to similar effect, they are in fact different mediums. Acrylic paints didn’t result in the end of oils or watercolors. 

This grain structure kills fascists.

The grain structure of celluloid film will always be different than the pixel structure of a digital sensor and so will the resulting images from both. The process by which silver halide crystals react to light will never be quiet the same as a digital chip registering visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Judas!

Whether one is “better” or not doesn’t interest me. What does interest me, is that the person taking the photograph has bothered to make a choice between the two. What is the subject and objective that motivated the photographer to choose film as the medium and what is the result? As long as those technical differences motivate a decision I am interested in the work of those photographers.

The second is to realize that shooting film is still embracing new technology. Film has never been better, unlike some vague argument for the “richness” of your vinyl record collection, film stocks are faster, have finer grain, more detail and provide a more vivid and dynamic color space than ever before. Chemical photography has continued to evolve since inception.

This advantage is actually even more obvious in film being used for motion pictures.  Film emulsions used for motion picture cinematography is enjoying some really exciting technical innovations currently, and using digital technologies to achieve them. 

Finally, shooting film forces the photographer into different habits. The medium we choose structures the way we see and in the end that is the value of a photograph, a record of one individuals perception of a moment. For better or worse every photograph taken on film has arguably a higher inherent value to the photographer than on digital, both economically and practically. 

CobraSnake doesn’t happen without digital cameras… and cocaine.

Film rolls on 35mm do not go above 36 exposures; the average compact flash card provides the photographer with hundreds of possible exposures. After the initial investment in the camera those digital images are free; in fact the more you take, the more cost effective the card and camera have become, whereas each film roll shot presents a significant cost in development and new film purchases.   

She should totally make this her profile pic, right?

With film, you are looking at hours to days before you see the images you captured, as a photographer you must be able to decide whether or not you “got the shot” based on what you remember seeing through the lens. Each shot on film is a gamble not presented to the digital photographer and series of minute cost/benefit analyses, repeated over and over.

For many photographers and cinematographers these limitations are the exact reason to go digital. For some photo-journalists and documentarians digital is often a no-brainer. But it is these limitations, and their influence on the images produced by the artists using film that fascinate me. Shooting film fundamentally changes the photographer and Funeral Photography is dedicated to finding those images and sharing the work of photographers who still find chemical film is a viable medium. 

Jon Edward Miller is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. He is a cinematographer, photographer and co-editor of Funeral Photography. His cinematography can be seen here. He tweets here. You can e-mail him here.

"The Ghost Who Walks" - Karen Elson (mp3)

"Pretty Babies" - Karen Elson (mp3)

"The Truth Is In The Dirt" - Karen Elson (mp3)

Funeral Photography #16

Funeral Photography # 10

Funeral Photography #30   

In Which We Experience The Passion of James Agee

The Truth of Sex

by LAURENCE BERGREEN

The early months of 1937 found James Agee preoccupied with his barely suppressed sexual longing. His four-year-old marriage to Via had become cold, abrasive, lifeless; at best they were friends. Everywhere he turned he saw women who seemed more attractive and who were ready and willing to return his interest. For the moment he confined his illicit activities to the cuddling of stray women at Greenwich Village parties, usually in the kitchen. As his restlessness became an open secret among their friends, both he and Via sensed their relationship was doomed; it was only a question of when and how it would end.

Several years after the fact, Agee re-created the events surrounding the breakup in voluminous detail, claiming that he possessed total recall and could remember everything that had ever happened to him. With his obsessive temperament and fanatical attention to detail, he recounted the story so fully and accurately that he planned to make it the basis of yet another autobiographical novel, one he never completed.

As Agee told it, he was then a young man entertaining "great delusions of worldly wisdom, of sophistication in matters of flirtation", a dangerously "passionate contempt for caution and convention," and a "passionate conviction that liberty and enjoying oneself are among the highest attemptable virtues." All these unfulfilled passions, and Via shared none of them. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Agee repeated to himself, after Blake; but by this standard he had committed an untold number of crimes.

To dull his senses, he resorted to a number of what he called "secondary" pleasures: smoking, reading, listening to jazz, and above all, drinking (highballs, at this point.) Among these minor vices, it was the drinking that Via most resented. Late one night in their Perry Street apartment, Agee later recalled, she offered him a glass of hot milk. Naked under the covers of their bed, he lifted his drink in reply. "You dope," Via said. "You don't know the meaning of enough, do you?"

"Sure I do," Agee replied. "Enough is too much."

Exasperated, Via applied camphor balm to her lips, rendering them unkissable. "I'm sorry I interrupted your little peccadillo in the kitchen," she said, referring to another of his "unseriously promiscuous" misadventures at a party they had attended earlier in the evening.

"So am I. It wasn't intentional, you know."

"That's what I mean, honey. I mean I'm sorry on your account."

Agee found his wife's lack of jealousy infuriating. If only she would make a sign, show a little passion, he might stop, but he feared she cared for him as little as he cared for her. Surely other couples felt more deeply. Not long before, he had seen one of his friends, Alice Morris, "slapping the bejesus" out of her husband, book reviewer Harvey Breit. In public, Agee denounced her possessiveness, but in private he conceded, "That's a wife, a real wife." When Via tentatively offered to make love, he kissed her on her cheek without desire and took another drag on his cigarette.

The next day the unhappy couple went for a walk in neaby Washington Square, where they were surrounded by "young families absolutely reeking of fecundity; and lovers who have just managed to get up after a day and night of it and are now taking in the soft air, on butterly legs, walking hip to hip." As for the Agees, they enjoyed neither sexual love nor family happiness.

Soon after, they went to tea at the apartment of Via's older sister, Silvia. Going to a tea party was not Agee's idea of fun; this pointless display of gentility sorely tried his patience, and it might even have been a ploy to restrict his drinking. But all was not lost, for among the guests was the attractive young musician who had been smitten with him at his wedding - Alma Mailman. She had just moved to New York in search of excitement and a musical career. The daughter of a Utica jeweler, she was tired of playing the role of Dr. Saunders' "lower-class protégée" and longed to make her own way in the world. At twenty-five, she was three years younger than Agee, sexually innocent, and brimming with curiosity.

Agee soon noticed the ardent, frightened girl from Utica. "She is exceedingly pretty. Her dressing and makeup are out of key with of any of the people" at the party, he wrote of his first impression. Because she was "a little bit poor provincial, garish and movie fannish," Agee came to feel a "secret sympathy" with her; they were both outsiders. His compassion for her swelled when he saw the others looking at her as if she were a "tart," and even the Saunders sisters, who should have known better, treated her with "an ineradicable tinge of patronage." He caught her glance, she caught his, and as the party wore on they stared ever more bodly at each other.

The more Agee learned about her, the more intrigued he became. Soon after, he talked with Walker Evans about the girl, confiding that he was in love, infatuated, he hardly knew what. "You'd better watch out," Evans advised over drinks. "You're going to get into trouble." Hashing over his feelings with Evans usually gave Agee a measure of insight, but this time he ignored the warning and remained "at least one jump behind the truth."

Several weeks later, Agee and Alma met again at another party, where the guests were drawn largely from the ranks of Time, Inc. They were given to playing a game they called Sardines. The rules were simple: When the lights were turned off, couples formed spontaneously and dashed off to a private corner for a few moments' furtive groping. After several unsatisfying encounters, Agee sidled up to Alma, and, during the next blackout, led her to the roof, where they could be alone. But once they reached their destination, they were overcome with shyness. "You know, they won't ever find us here," Agee finally said. "Sooner or later we'd have to give ourselves up."

"Why?" Alma asked. "Have you been up here before. You don't seem like the kind of man who'd hide without a girl." Agee laughed, embraced Alma, and kissed her on the cheek,. She quickly slithered out of his grasp, saying, "You know you mustn't."

But Agee did not see matters the same way. When he liked someone, he felt impelled to demonstrate his affections; it would be dishonest of him not to. Despite Alma's show of resistance, he was utterly captivated by her "odd blend of adolescence, ripeness, flirtatiousness, and her innocence." He took her hand, murmuring, "Do you know I like you very much? ... Why, I've been missing you badly, and I hardly know you ... More than anything else, I just want to be the best possible kind of friend to you. Do you see?"

"But you know so much more than I do," Alma said."

"Maybe that's one of the reasons."

By this time she had succumbed to Agee's homespun charm. In one-on-one conversations he was enormously convincing. The weaving of his hands, the extraordinary effort he made to shape each word with his lips, and the slight tremor in his face caused by the intensity of his desire to communicate - all combined in a mesmerizing display. Alma felt as if they were the only people in the world.

However, the tête-à-tête did not go unnoticed. Late that evening, Via, applying the hateful camphor balm to her lips, asked, "Do you intend to tell me about it?"

Agee played dumb. "About what?"

"You know perfectly well about what."

"Why sure I would. If there was anything much to tell...You think I made a pass at her."

"Of course I do," Via shot back.

"Well, I didn't. Nothing you could possibly really call a pass. Why, I put my arm around her. I kissed her once: but it was just purely in friendship and both of us knew it. Besides, she seems perfectly able to take care of herself. Half the guys in the room were after her."

As far as Via was concerned, her husband's behavior conformed to his established pattern of casual flirtation and indicated no serious threat. But their conversation continued, "in this painful blend of honesty and self-deceit and calculated dishonesty" until they went to sleep.

Again, Evans warned Agee to keep his distance from Alma. "She's a high school girl!" he said.

Agee insisted, "What excites me is seseing anyone start to learn a few things - start to grow up."

"She'll be a high school girl twenty years from now, no matter what happens to her." Yet even he was forced to admit there was something "God damned attractive about her." Agee heartily concurred.

He next saw Alma in, of all places, his own apartment. Suspecting nothing out of the ordinary in Agee's feelings for Alma, Via invited both her sister and the younger girl to dinner. At the last minute Silvia dropped out with a cold, and Alma came by herself in a downpour. At the end of the meal it was still raining, and at Via's insistence, Alma agreed to stay the night. There ensued a "pitiful and ominous ritual as the two women spread sheets for the studio couch in the living room," while a subdued Agee quietly played the piano.

After Via feel asleep, Agee stole into the living room, where Alma, wearing one of Via's nightgowns, slept soundly on the guest bed. At first he told himself he simply wanted to watch the girl in repose. But he could not resist taking her relaxed hand and stroking her bare arm, "first, the outside, then the more sensitive skin; then above the elbow, with the greatest subtlety and excitement." Sooner murder an infant in its cradle...

Suddenly Alma awoke "sharp as an animal" to order Agee back to his bed. He held his ground long enough to kiss her, to feel her breasts, and to sense that "despite a flicker of panic and good sense, she accepts and responds." They made love, Agree experiencing a passion and fulfillment he had never known with Via. It was only when the sky lightened that he crept back into bed besides the sleeping form of his wife. Overcome with remorse, Agee considered ending this brief affair while there was still a chance to save his marriage. In the morning, Alma left in a great hurry, before either Agee or Via could speak to her. Via could not imagine what was bothering the poor girl - some personal problem, in all probability.

alma & james with oona & charlie chaplin

For the next few weeks Agee and Alma kept their distance. They were playing with fire, and they knew it. Agee could not bring himself to forget about her. Thoughts of Alma crowded his every waking moment; if he believed in the truth of sex, he had to see her again, and again. Finally, after Via fell asleep one night, Agee left their apartment "with the utmost possible stealth" and walked to the apartment Alma shared with her friends Gladys Goldstone. With Gladys asleep, Agee and Alma talked in conspirational whispers. As he motioned to leave, he kissed her goodnight, a kiss so fond and long that they wound up making love on a nearby couch. Afterward they felt "excited and sad" as they realized they were falling in love.

To his chagrin, Agee found himself uttering the cliche that "this thing is bigger than we are." They were prisoners of their passions, hardly responsible for their actions. "After all," Agee said, "we've done about the best we could, short of not seeing each other at all. I'm not going to try to pull that crap about My Wife Doesn't Understand Me. She 'understands' me all right. And I love her very much... Only it's been a long time since we felt even the least bit in love; and the way I feel with you, I begin to wonder if we ever did, really." And he left Alma to ponder his words in solitude.

When he returned to Perry Street, Via was awake, and he immediately knew from the look on her face that she now suspected the extent of his involvement with Alma. "Whatever it is, we need to tell each other the truth," Via said.

"I won't lie," Agee replied. "You know I hate to. Only I hate to make you feel bad, too."

"It's a girl, isn't it?'

Agee nodded.

"Who is it?"

He relished the act of "saying The Name." As Via expressed her shock and disbelief, Agee took her hand.

Laurence Bergreen is a noted author and historian. This excerpt is taken from his book James Agee: A Life, which you can purchase here.

"Parker Browne" - Frontier Folk Nebraska (mp3)

"Buying My Time" - Frontier Folk Nebraska (mp3)

"Kentucky Girl" - Frontier Folk Nebraska (mp3)

In Which This Is The Fifth or Sixth Time Around For Bob Dylan

And Man Gave Names To All The Animals

by ANDREW ZORNOZA

It is not clear if they are hobos, farmers, or townsfolk, but it is clear that they are four people down on their luck, and they stare out from the movie screen like dustbowlers from a Walker Evans' photograph. In the background, a weathered gray barn yearns for the sky. An American ruin, completing the picture.

I live in paved-over Brooklyn. The word "Americana" conjures in me, for no rational or defensible reason, the photographed image of that lone man standing in front of tanks at Tienanmen Square. Except that, in my mind, the tanks are actually rolling down Flatbush Avenue and the man is Chris Rock, stripped to his underwear.

Parenthetically, I do not think of Woody Guthrie's hardscrabble narratives or Osh-Kosh overalls.

But this is a movie and that means the picture is moving. A distinctly unamerican giraffe now enters the scene, serenely chewing on nothing at all as he poses behind the barn. Apropos of what?

The camera then pans out to take in a bandstand, where a man in white-face deeply contemplates the wood at his feet. The man in white-face wears a tight red jacket with gold tassles—an outfit that A) is so beaten it looks like it has survived the bombing of Dresden B) is of indeterminate purpose: circus? parade? military? It's impossible to tell.

He sings in a deep,reverberating voice. Cerebral gears engage, churning through this inversion of minstelry—but are wrenched to a stop by a pleasant moment of recognition.

The man is Jimmy James, lead singer of My Morning Jacket. As Jimmy's song reaches a most achingly beautiful moment, he stretches out one single word: “Acapulco.” A cover. One of the most awful Dylan tunes of all time—on a first listen. A moment later, the song continues, beautiful once again—wait, wasn't this song awful?

I'm Not There is a glorious trainwreck of a movie. How it avoided going straight to DVD is more a testimony to the purchasing power of Dylan's army of committed fanboys and fangirls than it is to Todd Haynes art-house credentials.

But thank god for the fans—how long has it been since we've had a movie this self-conscious and painful? There is even a brief scene here with Black Panthers' Bobby Seale and Huey Newton waxing philosophical on "Ballad of a Thin Man." I practically could smell the marijuana smoke of the past wafting over the TV, over the Betamax case for Godard's Sympathy for the Devil....

What a great, brave, not-so-little, movie Todd Haynes has given us! This film addresses fame and persona more clearly (with a more challenging subject) than a million Basquiats and Walk The Lines and Fridas and Capotes and Pollocks all put together.

Dylan is largely an idiotic moron here, yet there's the nagging sense that he's onto something.

He is in some sort of purgatory, doomed to sing for eternity (excepting cigarette breaks marred by Samuel Beckett hitting him over the head with the Unnameable).

He clearly has put up a front all these years, but behind all of the strutting and nonsense and intimidation so clearly chronicled in Don't Look Back and Eat The Document...despite this and Dylan having the strongest aversion to being pinned down of any performer of our time...Dylan's off-stage inanities are as illuminating as his songs.

Definitions are the enemy of art. Words are definitions. We are surrounded by building blocks but are not blocks ourselves. We are vessels. Love minus zero equals no limit. Don't follow leaders. Watch your parking meters. The pump don't work cause the vandals stole the handle. Et cetera, et cetera.

Dylan's non-stop devil's advocacy and psycho babbling were not an act of distancing himself from the public. They were an intimate demonstration of method.

In order to get his songs balancing on multiple bleeding edges (irrational/rational; contemporary/past, emotional/intellectual) he had to dip into a primordial subconsious soup of armchair philosophy, Americana, and honest to goodness feelings.

And that's what poured out of the idiotic wind between his teeth when he was away from the stage. Everyone tuned him out or took him far too seriously then -- but the secret was there: you can't make sense out of soup, you just got to eat it.

You're not allowed to think very much in the current model of biography pictures. Even if Ray or Capote is shown to be flawed, the flaws are neatly presented. There is no real mystery. Citizen Kane has one sled named Rosebud that appears in two brief moments, these movies have battalions of sleds that encircle and follow the reader at every turn.

Todd Haynes has left the riddle behind and for that he should be applauded. Haynes insists that the young Bob Dylan was a slight black boy with the name of Woody Guthrie who carried around a guitar case that says, "This Machine Kills Fascists." What could be more ludicrous? Or better?

After being jeered as a Judas to the folk movement during the Free Trade Hall concert of May 17th 1966 (and having fans almost boo him off the stage), Dylan turns to Robbie Robertson and says, "Play fucking loud." The thump of Rick Danko's bass and Mickey Jones' drums drowns out the crowd in a decisive whoomp!

How little we knew then of who was on the right side. And how little it matters, if you're down in it.

Truthfully, I wasn't alive then. I have only experienced Dylan first-hand in Victoria's Secret commercials. Which is something like meeting Walt Whitman in a supermarket. It doesn't get much more surreal than that, does it?

Andrew Zornoza is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the author of the photo-novel Where I Stay available from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He lives in Carroll Garden.

"Lay Lady Lay" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

"I Threw It All Away" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

"Peggy Day" - Bob Dylan (mp3)