The Film: Workflow

I make my income sitting at a computer and I think I do entirely too much living in front of them. Between my laptop at home, my computers at work, and the iPhone I carry with me everywhere, I’m pretty much always connected. I’m strongly ambivalent about this but I’m not anti-technology. I’ve worked in the tech industry for 16 years and I appreciate its value and believe in its promise. I see glimpses of our future all the time and they usually excite me*.

Somewhere along the way though, I reached a tipping point and ever since I’ve felt a strong desire to back away from it all, to get some distance. This has become a dance where technology and I separate for a time, only to be reunited when the music requires it—not unlike one of those elaborate country waltzes in a Jane Austen story.

This project has changed the music for me though. Between blogging and my film workflow, that dance has turned into a kind of tango where the heat from my partner’s body is always felt and their hand continually within reach. Blogging (at the moment anyway) is worth it. Film, I’m less sure about. Is all that scanning to enable a digital workflow worth the cost? I’m undecided.

I saw a pretty good documentary on Robert Frank last night called An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps. There was a point in it where photographer Wayne Miller—a contemporary—talked about his memories of hanging out with Frank at the time he was working on The Americans. Miller mentioned that Frank would edit from his negatives, not prints. He’d hold them up to the light, cut out the frames he was interested in with a pair of scissors and toss the rest.

That kind of blew my mind a little.

If I could do that confidently, then… well, using film would be so much easier. I wouldn’t have to scan every frame, just the few I thought worthy of a second look. I could do the bulk of my editing without a computer. That sounds very—very—good to me. In fact, I’m swooning a bit right now just thinking about it.

However, I’ve got to be realistic. Although I can generally pick out the more promising pictures from the negative, I’m not so confident in my ability to do this that I could just write the rest off without at least doing a contact print. Maybe over time I can adopt the Frank style of editing, but I’m going to need a lot more practice and experience.

In the meantime, I think there’s a darkroom in my future.

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* They also disturb me occasionally too.

This is one in a series of posts I’m doing over the next week (or so) on using film during the Leica Year project.