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.
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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 that means making 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. And, ironically, it was a Kodak engineer who invented digital imaging – Steven Sasson – but the heck with him, the Kodak Board decided. People will always use filom.
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.
