PhotoDude.com

Thu. Jun 16, 2005

Decay of the Darkroom

We’ve all known it was coming. And it’s not exactly “The End,” but’s it’s still a notable marker. Like when Kodak stopped processing Kodachrome film. It wasn’t “The End,” it was the beginning of the end. And now, they’re going to stop making black and white paper.

Ending a century-old tradition, Eastman Kodak Co. will soon stop making black-and-white photographic paper, a niche product for fine-art photographers and hobbyists that is rapidly being supplanted by digital-imaging systems.

Kodak said Wednesday it will discontinue production of the paper, specially designed for black-and-white film, at the end of this year. But the world’s biggest film manufacturer will continue to make black-and-white film and chemicals for processing.

Business Week: Kodak to discontinue black-and-white paper

Like when Kodak decided to continue making Kodachrome film, but no longer do the processing of it, they’ve now decided they’ll keep making the films and film development chemicals, but not the final form of output … a black and white fiber-based paper.

But, no worries, right? There are many big companies that still make black and white paper, right? “Other companies, led by Ilford Imaging of Britain, still make paper and there will be demand for it, he predicted [...] Ilford, the largest maker of black-and-white photo paper, went into bankruptcy last year, emerging this year after a management-led buyout. Germany’s AgfaPhoto GmbH filed for bankruptcy last month.”

Er, OK. Well, there will likely always be niche companies to fill gaps like this, just as there are now niche companies doing nothing but making fine art paper for ink jet and gicleé printers. It just gets more expensive.

But it’s more than that: “‘It’s a shame to see it go,’ said Bill Schiffner, editor of Imaging Business magazine in Melville, N.Y. ‘Digital has done a lot of good things for the industry but it’s done some bad things too. It’s making a lot of these processes obsolete.’”

True. But, honestly, it’s taken a lot longer to catch up with the photo industry than it has for others. In the late 80’s, I dated a woman who was a typesetter. She truly enjoyed the esoterica of putting together little pieces of metal in intricate ways to get a page to print in a certain manner, and looked forward to a long and happy career. Within a few years, the typesetting industry was completely blitzkrieged by computers and desktop publishing.

You might think it’s not the same as printing in a darkroom, but it is in that they are both tactile experiences, compared to the digital version. They require a certain technical skill quite different from tapping at a keyboard. If you’ve ever been in a darkroom, you know there’s something a bit magical about first watching an image develop from nothing in a pan of chemicals under a red light. If you’ve ever cleared a developed print in stop bath, you know there’s a certain “stickiness” to the texture of the paper that tells you the developer is fully neutralized (or lacking it, that your stop bath is exhausted). And, yes, if you’ve spent much time in the darkroom, you probably feel that tongs are preferred, but there simply are times your fingers have to dip in the chemistry. Like I said, it’s a tactile experience.

And it can be a total pain. I’ve spent some absolutely torturous days in the darkroom in the cold of winter, when you think your constantly wet hand(s) (I actually used to have a “dry hand / wet hand” pattern) are simply never ever going to warm again. And after perhaps fifteen years of that, it therefore doesn’t bother me in the least that it’s now been over four years since I’ve done any darkroom work at all.

At least in the advertising portion of the photo industry, this change has been a progressive one. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, one of the first questions you asked about a job was “color, or black and white, or both?” It factored into the job and its pricing from the very beginning.

By sometime in the mid 90’s, the answer you would often get was “just shoot it in color, because we’re going to be scanning the film, and I’ll just convert it to black and white if we need that.” And in the past five years or so, many studios don’t shoot film at all, it’s all captured digitally and output to specific need.

And still. Some of the most powerful images I have ever seen were those of W. Eugene Smith. And a great part of their impact was the absolutely incredible black and white prints he laboriously crafted. He would often spend 48 hour stretches working on one “perfect” print. And it would leap off the wall and inhabit your consciousness in ways no “black and white print” produced today ever will.

But he’d mastered the tools and processes. And at the time of his peak, they’d been around nearly a hundred years. Today, we have new tools and processes. Very very new. We’ve hardly had them a decade, many of them less than that (like affordable digital SLR’s). Our foundation is very formative.

However, the old foundations are crumbling. There will always be those who delve into the old processes, from cyanotypes to simple silver prints. Just as there are those who still swear by and collect music on vinyl records.

It’s just really hard to find a turntable these days. Or a receiver with a phono pre-amp. But people do. And it may soon get hard to find a black and white enlarger, or printing paper. Or Kodak Dektol developer or Rapid Fixer.

But people will. Just in increasingly smaller numbers, so small that companies like Kodak, Ilford, and Agfa will have trouble surviving by supplying them. So, look for a new generation of smaller niche companies to take their place.

However, don’t look for a new generation of darkroom enthusiasts to swell their coffers. Those skills simply aren’t being taught anymore. Like typesetting.

Later, more from Photo District News: “In a marketplace where photographers in some areas are decreasingly able to find E6 processing facilities, forcing a move to digital for some and a move to C-41 workflow for others, this announcement comes as perhaps a final notice as to the decline of the roll of film in the professional photography world.”