Alex:
Thank you for the encouraging endorsement. Your opinion carries weight. I hope that more people get a chance to see how doable emulsion cookin' is. Even "dedicated space" isn't necessary. Like any activity, from quilting to darkrooming, it's just easier to not have to share space with the rest of life.
And it gets more compelling to learn a handcraft by the week. Especially in photography.
The cover story of this week's issue of Science News is "computed photos". Amazing. I suggest everyone interested in photography familiarize themselves with the issue. The current crop of digital cameras are the stone ax and wood club step between analog photography as it was known 50-100 years ago and the technologies of computational photography being developed as we speak. I don't know much about digital photography, but I do get a sense that there is still quite a bit of hands-on. At least you still have to take a RAW file and manually do something or other in Photoshop. If my intuition proves out, those are the manual steps that will be ancient history very, very soon.
The photographic art that will excite collectors won't be the limited editions made from standardized, reproducible materials (analog or digital), but the handcrafted print - by its nature a unique work. Of course, this is already true with pt/pd. I hope people will consider how retro/artsy/impossible the process seemed as recently as the publication of "The Keepers of Light" in 1979. Silver gel is in that same position today. |