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The photo wars back then
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There's a little bit of a feud that's broken out online this week. Instagram, the photo sharing site that facebook paid a billion dollars to buy a couple of months ago, has decided it's not gonna let its pictures show up on Twitter.
There's a whole bunch of online he said she said goin' on here but the end result is something of a hiccup for online photo sharing.
And how we use and see photography.
But let me take you back to an earlier time, when you needed film and chemicals to see what you had. Analog photography is an industry that's all but dead -- a demise that Robert Burley has spent the past few years documenting in "The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era."
As a photographer, Burley says his most essential material, his film, came from photography giants like Kodak and Polaroid. At their height, these companies employed hundreds of thousands of people. Their office and factory complexes took up spaces the size of city blocks and were easily the tallest buildings in sight. Their legacy was built in a century, but lost in a decade.
Many of Burley's photographs depict the actual desctruction of Kodak complexes in the United States, France and Canada. Others show anciliary buisnesses that have shut down -- the local photo processing shop or a small-town photography studio -- call them collateral damage.
Burley says when he started compiling the images for the book, it was obvious that the project would be done on film. "Within a space of six years, this technological transition has happened and run full cycle. I would say it's pretty much over by now."
He compares 2005 when "the Eastman Kodak company was ahead of Apple on the Fortune 500 list" to today when Kodak has declared bankruptcy and "Apple has created the device that is most popular for creating photographs. And it's also a phone, by the way."
What was once a big industry is now history. There is still some film out there though. I still shoot and process my own black and white film. It is something I can totally concentrate on for an hour and forget about everything else. Its like how other people play golf I suppose. I'm glad for the internet now, because there is nowhere in my city to buy the film and supplies I need, but I can still get them with a click of the mouse and a credit card number. No matter how much the technology progresses, I think its important to keep the old methods alive, just in case we need to use them again someday.
I really enjoyed this show which brought back many memories. My parents' best friends ran a little photo shop. Unlike people today working in electronics stores who barely know anything about equipment they sell, people in photography shops had a lot of advice about taking pictures and equipment. Also, medical imaging has gone digital as well. Hospitals all used to have darkrooms. When I was training in ultrasound in 1982, many darkroom techs were blind, and VA hospitals often had techs who had been blinded while in the service. As the darkness disappeared, so did these jobs. I wonder now what happened to these people who worked in an occupation particularly suited to their visual disability/ability.
