Photographs, Photographers and Photography

Good photographs are like car accidents. Most happen close to home.

At first that sounds trite but a moment of reflection on the simple mathematics of travel discloses that most of our lives are spent close to home. We spend more time in the garage starting the car and waiting for the door to open than at any other point of any journey. Over many trips, a greater percentage of time is spent one mile from home than two. Travel five miles and you have to travel mile one. Travel a thousand and you still travel mile one. And so on. That is why most car accidents occur close to home, because that is where you spend most time.

That, too, is why most good photographic opportunities are close to home. The harried tourist, trying to find his way around Paris with a guide book, poor French and the ever helpful Parisian to guide him, arrives at the Eiffel Tower stressed and late. He is also tired, having lugged his gear a considerable distance in search of that once in a lifetime snap, aware that the chances of revisiting this location are remote. So to add to the newness of the environment are the additional pressures of failure (“I only have one chance to get this right”), time pressures (“Must not miss that flight”) and equipment concerns (“Did I pack that ultra-wide lens?”). The lighting is new, the length of daylight is new, the feel of the place is new. In other words, there are so many environmental changes that the chances of taking a well thought out, skillfully composed photograph are remote. As remote as the location.

Now compare that to the situation back home. You know the area within a five mile radius of your home like the back of your hand. If you don’t, well then you lack the curiosity to be a photographer. You have photographed it often, seeing new things every time, looking through ever more inquiring eyes, varying the time of day and enjoying various weather conditions. It matters not whether home is the Bronx or Brighton, there are as many photographic opportunities close to your home as anywhere else. No, there are more because you have time to see and think, luxuries not available to other than the most affluent tourist who can afford a month’s stay at a remote location of choice.

When I compiled my book Street Smarts, most of whose content is comprised of street shots in London in the mid-1970s, it dawned on me that over ninety percent of those pictures were taken within five miles of home. These were areas I knew and loved and had visited many times. The wonderful words Alan Jay Lerner placed in Henry Higgins’s mouth in My Fair Lady come to mind:

I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face
She almost makes the day begin.
I’ve grown accustomed to the tune
She whistles night and noon.
Her smiles, her frowns,
Her ups, her downs
Are second nature to me now;
Like breathing out and breathing in.
I was serenely independent and content before we met;
Surely I could always be that way again and yet
I’ve grown accustomed to her looks;
Accustomed to her voice;
Accustomed to her face.

And that is exactly how I thought of the London I was photographing. Our relationship was a continuum, having good days and bad, great weather and foul, exhilaration and despair.

And that, whether you love your location or hate it, is how, I suggest, you feel about it too.

So the best pictures are to be found on your doorstep as no one knows it as well as you. The following snap is of an olive tree on my California estate, outside the window on my left as I write. It was taken last November from my front porch, with the photographer splendidly attired in paisley pajamas and that dashing terry cloth robe which gives me the looks of a movie star. A foul morning, foggy and damp. But second nature to me now.

The best photographs are to be found close to home.

My learning experiences with my newly acquired large format Crown Graphic 4” x 5” camera have reminded me what a bore technique really is when it comes to photography. Or, more accurately, the job of learning a new technique. The most intrusive aspect of this learning experience is that it really gets in the way of taking pictures, and the more I find myself thinking about technique the more distracted my picture taking becomes.

I suppose there are many analogies to the bother that is technique in everyday life. Driving a car smoothly, making a perfect mortise and tenon joint in two pieces of wood, learning your way around some new piece of software. Heck, remember the first time you made love? Your major concern was not enjoyment. It was technique, assuming you were sober enough to remember anything. In these, and innumerable other examples, once technique is mastered, enjoyment begins. So I tend to see technique as an obstacle to enjoyment or, in creative pursuits, to creativity. Which is the same thing.

I started taking pictures and being serious about it – meaning I wanted to produce good work – when I got my first Leica at the age of eighteen. Up to then picture taking had been nothing more than dilettante dabbling. In realizing that fewer variables made for less to worry about, I standardized on one lens (well, it’s all I had in any case), one make of film (TriX) and one developer (D76). Over-exposure, I quickly learned, was the death knell of definition, underexposure playing havoc with shadow detail and dynamic range (though we didn’t call it that in those days). So the first technical lesson was to get the exposure more or less right. Then memorizing which direction the controls had to be turned to focus and adjust exposure was critical. As my avocation was street shooting, no time could be spent thinking about these. Finally, the chemical darkroom (ugh!) required learning how to black the room out properly, get the foul, smelly chemicals at the right temperature (68F in frigid London was not always that easy) and then exposing the paper properly. Of course, unlike modern digital back ends, making two identical prints was more a case of luck than judgement, but after a while, and not a few sheets of wasted paper, 8”x10” prints started to roll off the old Gamer enlarger like GM makes cars, if maybe not as quickly. At least the quality was better than Detroit’s.

It really showed in the negatives. A few years ago when I got my first decent negative scanner and printer I could see how the early monochrome work got consistently better, the success rate higher, after the first few dozen rolls of film. In those days you submitted pictures for publication as prints in the mail, so they had to be good prints. A good print, it seemed, put you in the 10% pile immediately – the non-rejects. Those many years later, learning ’darkroom’ technique again, as applied to those old TriX negatives, was trivial compared to what the chemical darkroom called for. You could scan at high or low definition but a simple, high resolution unmanipulated scan allowed you maximum flexibility in Photoshop. Sadly, the scanning software could not apply its dust and scratch reduction to the silver based originals, reminding me how bad my drying technique for film had been all those years ago. At least retouching was now a one-off prospect, and not something to be done on each print. Can you imagine a worse use of your time than retouching dust and scratches? I cannot.

I have not had a chemical darkroom for over 25 years now. First, I realized that I was adding no value to my pictures by developing my own film. So I let labs do it. Their volumes assured consistency and the better ones guaranteed quality. Never mind black and white, think of the complexities added when you process color. There is simply no earthly justification for processing your own film. Period. In other words, I delegated that aspect of technique to those more competent than I. And as my time saved was worth more to me than the incremental cost of delegating the task, I made money into the bargain. Not bad.

Then in the 1980s through the mid-1990s, before scanners and printers became affordable, I delegated all my printing to labs also. Same reasons. Just a question of finding one you liked. No one, but no one, has ever asked me whether I printed a picture myself or whether a lab did it. Except, that is, for equipment geeks, whom I try to avoid at all costs. truth be told, something was lacking in the prints however, for dodging and burning was not something easily delegated. But mostly the results were good enough.

Then, when really good printers and scanners became available for home use, I could recapture the creative side by doing my own scanning and printing using Photoshop with just those tweaks to the image I wanted. After learning the technique (if, indeed, anyone can ever claim to have learned Photoshop), control was reestablished over the creative process. For some, back end manipulation is 90% of the creative process. Ansel Adams for example. Mediocre photographer, great darkroom technician. For others, back-end technique is 10% of the process. I’m at the 10% end, mostly. But the point is that the technique, once learned, is subsumed to the creative process. The technique, in other words, becomes invisible and ceases to be an obstacle, as it has become second nature.

When I got my first wide carriage printer, I set the simple technical goal that any scanned original – whether 35mm or medium format, and now large format – would yield a sharp, 13” x 19” print of broad dynamic range, by default. Not by accident.

So as I find myself struggling to master the new aspects of technique of large format photography, I am making strenuous efforts to make these techniques second nature. Some are trivial. It is, for example, very difficult not to take a very sharp picture. A 4” x 5” negative does not need much enlarging! Anyone can make huge, crisp prints from large format originals. Hardly something to set as a goal. But loading those blamed film holders, packing that heavy gear, messing with swings and tilts and clumsy controls, and not letting all that process get in the way of seeing, that takes some learning.

So my advice to you is the same that I follow – work hard, work fast to get that technique down so that it becomes second nature, then forget about it and get on with the creative side. Your pictures will immediately be better and it will show. And don’t let anyone tell you it takes years to learn this or that aspect of technique. It does not. Those who would tell you otherwise are trying to safeguard their not so precious secrets. Avoid them.

My second 4″ x 5″ photograph. Technique is getting there….

It was the height of the tech boom. 1999. A close friend of mine, maybe the person I care more for than anyone I know, had hit it big. He’s a modest man, not given to self-aggrandisement. But he had had a tough childhood, he had married the woman of his dreams relatively late in life and he had had made a son of whom he was justly proud, even though the making had come rather late.

So for the first time, he had said ‘What the heck!. I’m going to get a beautiful place, the better to see the wife and child grow’. And because the wife, at her not-so-tender age had expressed an interest in the piano, something very close to my friend’s heart, why, he went out and got her the very best he could afford, to be installed in the place of honor in his splendid, new estate in America’s most hallowed zip code. Not only was this piano imported directly from Germany but it came replete with the maker’s signature, no less.

I will never forget the look of sheer delight on his face the day it arrived. ‘Thomas’ he called excitedly, ‘You have got to see this thing’. Now while my friend was endowed with something akin to perfect pitch, he couldn’t play a note if you paid him. But he knew the instrument of his choice was capable of great things. Indeed, the sound was beyond compare. My friend had invited a classical pianist to put the instrument through its paces and some four of Chopin’s Nocturnes later you new that heaven was close indeed.

For a while there after that magical evening I lost track of him and his wife, the pianist in the making. He survived the fallout in the markets in 2000, moved on to better things and took the wife with him. Then we happened to bump into one another again and wiled away a pleasant evening over a couple of bottles of Napa’s finest with the food prepared just so.

“She cannot play to save her life”, he said, once well into his cups. “Come now”, I responded, “let’s not be so cruel. After all, you cannot fault the effort she puts into the thing”. For try she did. Twice weekly lessons, endless practice, scores by the….well…score. If effort correlated with results, the woman would have surpassed Horowitz. Sadly, she was proof of just one more example that you cannot put in what God leaves out, and that fateful evening, my friend had realized the truth of the matter, cruel as it may be. His piano was nothing more than a piece of beautiful furniture. It was a Leica in a glass case. There to be admired, but if the aesthetic senses of the world were to be saved, never to be used.

So is it enough if you just enjoy it? Does it matter that you have spent the earth and accomplished nothing except, maybe, a blip on the manufacturer’s bottom line. Do you grin and bear it and say, well, I tried?

The economic reality, of course, is that without consumers like my friend there would be no economy. Ferrari owners who cannot drive. Steinway owners who cannot play. And Leica owners who cannot take a photograph. But it is not fair to denigrate these folks. They are, after all, a source of cheap supply of the world’s finest equipment to those of us who dare not, or cannot, buy it new.

The UPS driver was getting used to the routine.

Every Friday there was a delivery to the estate from B&H in New York. Place your order for film or paper or printing inks on a Sunday and the following Friday, as sure as the Government wants your money every April 15th, UPS arrives at your door with the supplies.

A First Class Business selling First Class Products delivered by a First Class Business.

Now this little haven in the undiscovered central coast of California, has much to recommend it. Beautiful landscape, vineyards as far as the eye can see (not least the few acres of Zinfandel we pride ourselves on, affording isolation from all and sundry, and looking gorgeous in the process) and fine, honest Americans.

So we got to chatting, every Friday, our UPS man and I. There’s something about UPS that encourages that sort of relationship. FedEx doesn’t have it. Too harried, no time for civilized discourse. The grandly named United States Post Office obviously does not. Are you going to trust someone who takes your tax dollars? But no one refers to the UPS man. It’s always our UPS man.

So after a few months of this routine, and after copious quantities of Portra, Gold and Epson paper and inks had been delivered, it was natural to graduate to first name terms. I’m Marty. Hi, I’m Thomas.

And thus it went for a few more months. Ice is hard to break and these UPS chaps have it in their veins in abundance. As is well known, every one wants a UPS man of their own.

Then, the other day, Marty opens up with “I’m giving a concert at Castoro this Sunday at 3 p.m.”

Let me start by saying that Castoro makes the second best zinfandel on the Central Coast. Needless to add, Chateau Winston, named after my son, a.k.a. the family abode, is superior. Both reside in that small area of paradise known as the Templeton Gap, west of Highway 101 and south of Highway 46. The world’s best Zinfandel grapes make their home there.

Before I could ask ‘What do you play’ Martin Paris proferred a CD with a picture of him on the cover, acoustic guitar and all. Without thinking, after profuse thanks, I offered that I was a photographer and could I please inscribe a copy of my book for you? The thought of commerce did not remotely enter my head. After all, it hardly needs saying that playing classical instruments or taking art photographs are two of the least commercial enterprises on this God’s earth. So we made an exchange. Marty’s Spanish guitar playing, all of his own compositions, is simply wonderful. His generosity of spirit and basic sense of American decency unsurpassed. My book of picture is….well, you be the judge.

So we exchanged good wishes. Marty signed his CD “Thomas – All My Best” and I reciprocated with “For Martin – with thanks for the beauty you have brought us”.

This little episode, seemingly insignificant in the grand panoply of life, brings us back to the central beliefs of these essays. Show your work and you will be rewarded. The rewards may be psychic rather than financial, but they are deep and lasting.

Publish a book. Now. Have something to exchange.

The vines doing their thing on the estate, framed by a cottonwood.

You need some woodworking done in your home. Two laborers show up bidding to do the work. One brings with him only hand tools. Not a motor or power source in sight, save his well developed biceps. The other comes with an assistant and every power tool known to man. Both come recommended, so you know the quality of the work is not an issue.

Which do you choose? The romantic aspects of the craftsman with the brawny arms notwithstanding, you obviously choose the man with the power tools and the assistant. He will be faster, his work more dimensionally accurate and less of your precious time will be taken up with the sawing and hammering that ensues. Plus it will cost you less.

In that example the value of your time is irrelevant as you are not doing the work in either scenario.

Now translate the problem to one of making photographic prints. You pride yourself on traditional darkroom techniques, you set up your darkroom, prepare the quickly aging chemicals and potter about in the dark, shading here and burning there, never quite sure how it will turn out, the while praying that little Johnny will not come into your miserable, smelly work area and destroy yet another box of printing paper.. You are automatically constrained to monochrome, of course, because it is beyond any rational person’s effort to home process color prints using traditional chemical means. So right there you have excluded 99% of your audience. When all is done and the print fixed, you pray it will look something like what you want when the light is switched on (you did put the unexposed paper away first, didn’t you?) and luckily, even if it does, your are still faced with the task of washing the prints in an attempt to render them permanent, drying, glazing, and on and on. You have retained the artisan with the hand tools.

You and the artisan have failed to notice one key thing about life. Technology has moved on. Both of you have unconsciously placed a very low value on your time.

The power tool photographic worker, meanwhile, having established a well rehearsed routine, has used Photoshop or whatever his application of choice is, done what dodging and burning is needed, removed dust spots (he only needs to do this once, ever, while the artisan must do it on every print) and spooled out twenty print jobs to his computer and left it to print while getting on with other more important things. Like taking more photographs.

The power tool worker’s level of retouching and corrections is infinitely superior and his prints are all identical. Exactly, you say, see, they are all identical. No two of my prints are ever alike. Obviously not. Your are technically incapable of making identical prints as your technology is inept. Making prints that look different is nothing more or less than a statement of your incompetence and refusal to recognize that times have changed. And they have changed for the better.

You tell yourself that none of that makes any sense, of course, as your traditional darkroom print is so much better. Of course, it is impossible for you to make that statement, as you have never mastered the modern technology of the computer print, but it makes you feel self satisfied and happy. Your time, in other words, is worth very little.

The reality is that not only is your print not better than the ink jet worker’s, you produce one for every twenty or thirty his modern machinery outputs. His artistic output is thus many times yours, his chances of acceptance and success commensurately greater. Worst of all for you, the artisan, is that the consumer cares not how the print was made. He just cares about the result. Unless you are showing your work to those sad souls who collect equipment and cannot take a picture to save their lives (why would you waste your time doing that?), believe me, no one will ever ask you what camera you used or – I mean how comical – inquire whether this is a chemical or ink jet print!

You already have a computer or you would not be reading this. Supremely competent ink jet printers are available for under $100. Photoshop Elements retails for a similar amount unless it happens to come free with your printer.

Then, when you become supremely successful, the resulting tripling of your time for photography certainly enhancing your prospects greatly, you can delegate all printing to some poor toad who does this for a living and get rid of the printing drudgery for once and all.

So what’s your excuse?

It’s high time we got off the ‘Monochrome is Art’ bandwagon and learned to use Color.

When I was a kid growing up in London, all I used in my Leica, representing some 95% of my worldly assets, was Tri X. Monochrome film. Easy to buy, easy to process, lots of exposure latitude for my wonky exposure meter and not least of all, very macho. Every street ‘shooter’ (that foul word had not yet been applied to photographers) used Tri X. It was a rite of passage. The quirky fellows with the strange odor used HP3 and HP4. You avoided them.

But none of these was the primary reason I used monochrome. The real reason was that it was cheap and cheap was all I could afford. The idea that you could use color never entered my mind. Economically prohibitive and why would you want color when street work dictated monochrome? Why, could Brassai, Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and Erwitt all be wrong? Of course not. They were Masters. Gods, beyond criticism. Look to points west and further confirmation that Monochrome was Where It Was At could be readily obtained from its American boosters. Adams, Weston, Cunningham, Callahan, Stieglitz, Steichen, the list goes on and on. And while one or two of these would eventually venture into color, they would forever be known for their black and white work. Their subject matter might be the landscape and the nude, but their vision was monochrome. Goodness help us. A monochrome woman….

Then a couple of strange things happened. A great British photographer named Anthony Armstrong-Jones popularized the idea of very grainy pictures, in black and white, of course, whether in his fashion magazine work or in social commentary pieces. Another great British photographer named Sarah Moon, who wisely chose to make Paris her home, followed up on the idea when GAF/Ansco introduced its wildly grainy GAF 500 color slide film. Suddenly, in this world of Seurat redux, pointillism was back and all wrinkles and imperfections disappeared into a gentle haze of colored dots. But there was a photographer far more important than either of these, as regards the history of color, and that photographer was Eliot Porter.

Porter was a devotee of color almost from the beginning, most famously garnering Ansel Adams’s scorn for his adherence to this new medium. Porter, not a voluble man, famously said “I believe that when photographers reject the significance of color, they are denying one of our most precious attributes – color vision.” Porter may not have changed our view of landscape photography, but his vision of the beauty and infinite complexity of nature changed the way we see. If we care to see.

Let’s just make a seismic shift, for a moment, to the mathematical work of Benoit Mandelbrot. Quoting from his paper presented to the Society for Chaos theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, presented at Berkeley in June, 1996:

“Fractals, as all present know, are irregular geometric objects that yield detail at all scales. Unlike Euclidean, differentiable, objects that smooth out when zoomed into, fractals continue to reveal features as more closely regarded. Fractals also have “self-similarity” which, in one meaning refers to the presence of parts that resemble the whole, or to the continual repetition of a feature. Benoit Mandelbrot not only invented the term fractal, but advanced the position that fractal geometry is the geometry of nature. Eliot Porter, the nature photographer, upon reading of Mandelbrot’s work, realized he had been taking pictures of fractals in nature for decades. To promote the point, he produced a collection of photographs for a book titled Nature’s Chaos “

I do not doubt that there is no more important body of work, when it comes to our fundamental appreciation of nature and of color photography, than that of Eliot Porter. Porter made color respectable for the art photographer. It is that simple.

OK, back to the simpler world of situation comedy, beer advertisements and SUVs.

Now it’s time to ‘fess up.

Take one of your color pictures, you know, one of those not good enough to boast about, but not bad enough to throw away. A decent but not a great picture. You know the one. We all have many to choose from. They are the bane of us photographers. Too good to lose, too bad to print, the result being that we keep the disk drive manufacturers, the album makers, the storage sleeve specialists in business for no good reason other than, were we brutally honest, we would simply throw these mediocrities away.

OK, so you are a sane modernist. You may not have gone the whole digital hog, but you are smart enough not to waste time in a darkroom, preferring the civilizing light of nature. You prefer, in other words, Porter’s world. You scan those mediocre negatives and ruminate over them in Photoshop. Now that insanely complex application happens to have a ‘Desaturate’ option in one of its many tediously detailed menus. Don’t fight it. It’s under Image->Adjustments->Desaturate. Click. Yes, Siree Bob!, you have made monochrome from color. Gold from dross. Art from a snap.

C’mon. Admit it. You have done it. Or you have thought about doing it. Because Monochrome is for artistic simpletons. Two dimensional thinkers too constrained in their cages, too bound by convention, too attuned to mediocrity, to think that anything other than black and white, B&W, monochrome, sepia, platinum toning, etc., etc., can be Art.

I think back over five hundred years of painting. From Ucello and Giorgione, via Raphael and Velasquez, through the Impressionist and the Fauves, to the modern day. Not one, not a one of them painted in monochrome. Why? Because there was no cost difference and because patrons regarded monochrome as the province of the poor. The dictate of the sketch. The conté crayon drawing. The pencil rendition. The idea for a painting.

So stop fooling yourself. You can no longer justify it, as I did, on grounds of cost. The very fact that you are reading this on your computer places you in the top 1% of the world’s income bracket. You can afford color. But your excuse is simple. I Am An Artist, you say. What you mean is that you are not good enough for color. Because you cannot handle it. It’s just one variable too many as you avoid making the effort.

Color is hard.

But, as Porter reminds us, color vision is one of our most precious attributes.

This article was written just about the time Canon announced the first ‘affordable’ full frame digital camera, the EOS 5D. Unknown to me one would feature in my future, confirming the facts set forth below.

Film is dead as sure as the LP is dead.

Wake up! Smell the coffee. Don’t fight it.

Digital is better in every way known to man. Think about it. The medium is all of ten years old. We are already debating, frequently acrimoniously, whether the latest 16 megapixel Canon beats medium format.

It started as a joke. One megapixel was a big deal and guaranteed you a crappy postcard print. But it was chic. You could see the result even before you printed it. Take that, Edwin Land! Take that, Polaroid!

The apocryphal story has it that Edwin Land invented the Polaroid process when his little daughter asked why she could not see the picture right away. It didn’t hurt that he was a world class genius constrained only by the mediocrities around him. Further, he was an American, which meant that being a world class chemist/physicist/engineer was not enough. He had to be a world class capitalist, too, and make money from his brilliant invention.

If you are over forty and reading this, you will remember the thrill of that first Polaroid. If you are over 50, you will recall pulling apart the monochrome negative and print, wondering about what we now know as metamerism (it had a strange bluish tint when tilted to the light), extricating that foul smelling pink sponge (it had to be pink. Pink is jolly. Ask the cast of Funny Face, made about the time Land was busy being brilliant). Carefully spreading the goo over the print you made it permanent. But Edwin was not content. He had to go the whole hog, so he made it happen in color. Now you separated negative and print, studiously avoiding the deadly caustic chemicals produced and, hey presto!, a dry color picture with no need for the chemical, carcinogenic goo.

A great American photographer made a wonderful career from Land’s genius, taking huge, I mean huge (4”x5” was a snapshot for her) Polaroids of quirky subjects. Queer sailors, lonely city dwellers, assorted losers, bizarre low key still lifes. Marie Cosindas was the real thing. An artist who saw an outlet for a new technology and capitalized on it brilliantly.

But Edwin was not done. Or maybe that hellion of a daughter simply would not leave him alone. Why have the silly, pungent, dangerous, useless negative, he wondered? Why not, why not, have the print emerge magically from the camera, powered by a disposable motor, blank as a politician’s intellect, and then, magically, proceed to appear in broad daylight for all to see. And he did it. Without a doubt, George Eastman’s ‘You Take the Picture, We do the Rest’ had been well and truly one-upped. For any photographer who has slaved in a darkroom, surrounded by smelly chemicals, stuff dripping on the carpet, this was the civilized white man’s gin-martini variation on the heretefore put-upon-minority-digging-for-diamonds-in-a-South-Africa-mine darkroom worker’s wonder at the emerging print in the developing tray.

So, for a while, those who could afford it wondered at Land’s surpassing accomplishment. They were all American, needless to say, having not only the funds to afford the film (like Gillette, Land believed in virtually giving away the cameras to secure the income annuity from the supplies) but that great thirst for immediate gratification that the Founding Fathers had ordained were the American’s birthright. Life, liberty and the pursuit of immediate gratification. And pursue it they did. Edwin Land and his Polaroid Corporation were, deservedly, King.

But Kodak had bigger fish to fry. Or, more accurately, a larger weight of fish to fry, even if the average fish was a minnow, economically speaking. So they struck back. Big Yellow saw that they could not compete on speed – Are you nuts? You want to beat 60 seconds for instant gratification? – but they could compete on price. With reasonable speed. If Mrs. Middle America, 2.4 kids and a Chevrolet, could drop off her film with Johnny on the way to school on Monday and have 36 perfectly foul, unfocused, ill exposed, prints back when dropping off same Johnny on Tuesday, why she could get over the delay when it meant 25% of the cost compared to Mr. Land’s Magic Machine. That could be reserved for the nouveau riches and the Old Money in Greenwich, Park Avenue and Atherton.

So Polaroid died. Not before winning what was then the world’s largest patent infringement fine in 1985 from, you guessed it, Kodak, who had stolen Land’s technology in a pathetic attempt to beat the master. But sunset was in sight for both businesses by then. Polaroid was just too expensive and the Greenwich Dames lost interest and reverted to riding their horses and attending society lunches. Kodak was King once more. Add the Instamatic and its many variants, which made it easy even for the average inpatient at the local loony bin to load a camera and take a well exposed picture, and you had market domination.

By 1985 Kodak, too, was in deep doo-doo. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s you could buy Kodak film just about anywhere on the planet in a dizzying array of formats: Minox, 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, 828, 127, 120, 620, 4×5, 5×7, 8×10 and larger. Nor was the choice of emulsion compromised, with such great names as Panatomic X, Verichrome, Plus X, Super XX, Tri X, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Vericolor, All standards in their class. Add imaging products for the medical and scientific worlds and a vast selection of chemicals and papers to render the image real, and you have a stunning exercise in world domination. Competition? Well it was a fly on the proverbial elephant’s rump. Adox, Agfa, Ansco, Ilford, Orwo, Perutz and many others held, in aggregate, a share of the market that was little more than a rounding error. Kodak’s products were indecently good when the lack of real competition is considered.

Students of the American stock market will readily remind you that there were 20 stocks in the Dow in 1900. Only one survives today. General Electric. And good old GE dropped out for a while there on account of a little thing known as bankruptcy. Not conducive to a NYSE listing. But the folks at Kodak were poor historians. Why, they reckoned, our founder may have done himself in, gone the hari kari route, smoked the old gun barrel while tugging on the trigger, but we are King. We invented You Take the Picture, etc. We invented Kodachrome. Hell, Hitler was photographed on Kodachrome. Two Jewish violin players who liked to take snaps and happened to be chemistry geniuses, invented Kodachrome. National Geographic would not publish your stuff if you did not use Kodak film. Not for nothing was the producer of film in Rochester, New York, the Company Town, know as the Yellow God.

What the folks at Kodak refused to recognize is that Everything Changes. A disastrous string of CEOs, guys who committed grand larceny every payday, did a superb imitation of the ostrich, disregarding the world around. First, they missed Fuji which, as is the Japanese’ habit, started making gold after an extended period of dross. Then they missed digital. By a whole decade. Just think. In 100 years, there will be no Microsoft. A consummation devoutly to be wished. No GM or Ford (OK, 30 years in their case). No Democratic Party (everyone will be rich). And no film. But Kodak did not see the world’s biggest technological revolution coming. There would always be a Kodak. A yellow box assuring quality, consistency, availability.

History will judge whether Kodak awoke in time. They only missed the first ten years, after all. But something tells me the film makers of tomorrow will hail from points east of Madison Avenue and will be named Sony, Hitachi and China Somethingorother. Because film, dear photographer, dear consumer, dear searcher for instant gratification, is about as dead as the dodo.

Don’t fight it. It has had a good run. One hundred years and counting. The first records lasted forty years. The LP 30 years. The CD must be about done at 20 years. So film did OK. But it is dead.

Sure, some poorer economies will struggle on with film for a while, but don’t reckon on opening any new processing plants in China. Having gone from no telephones to cell phones in one generation, why think that the world’s fastest growing consumer society will not do the same with photography? And where do you think all those digital cameras and storage media are made, anyway?

Digital has achieved 60, 70, 80%, go figure, of the definition/sharpness/dynamic range of film in ten years. Ten years! And the consumer gets 1,000 or more shots on a ‘roll’. And they are free after the camera is purchased (assuming he values his time at zero, which is reasonable in most cases). And it is irrelevant, dear advanced photographer, what you think as you are not the market. The consumer is the market and he wants things now. Plus he gets to take 3 pictures a second of revolting Aunt Minnie, the one with killer halitosis who doesn’t give a monkey’s how the snaps come out but only that she can see them before she finally kicks the bucket and gives the funeral parlor some well deserved business.

Too bad Kodak didn’t retain her as an adviser.