Why create images with Really Big film? (Leaving aside, for the moment, the people out there with even bigger cameras.) Each image is a fussy process of setting up the tripod, setting up the camera, getting everything level, and then working through a checklist out of an aircraft cockpit. All to try to avoid ending up with a blank sheet, a double exposure, or some other D’Oh moment.
A classic justification is the virtue of having to think about each image. This is not a new idea. Recently, I saw a reprint of an article from the early days of roll film. I won’t try to bring a an accurate quotation back from memory. However, you may have read jeremiads lamenting digital photography’s encouragement of the creation of myriads of mediocre images. If so, you would find the sentiment of this article familiar. Only, instead of decrying 200 full frame digital images, or even 36 35mm images, it was a roll of, at most, eight images that set this author to foaming at the mouth.
I have to admit that nothing is stopping me from stopping, and thinking carefully, digital camera in hand.
Perhaps closer to my own motivation is the pleasure of working with my hands. The view camera is a mechanism big enough to see, disassemble, and understand. I tilt the front of the view camera, and I see the image get straighter. I spend all day long at work directing digital traffic, marshaling cohorts of tiny bits of silicon to do tricks. It feels comfortable to work on a smaller scale.
My line of thought here leads to our guest bathtub. Which contains a bucket. Which contains a temperature control device. Can you see where this is going? I’m developing film. When you expose film, you create a latent image. No one can see it until you render it manifest. When I develop film, I work in the dark to bring something to light. I can’t see my hands while I wrestle film onto a holder and put it into the tank, and I can’t watch the chemical process that converts an extremely fragile latent image to a fairly robust negative. To take what I see, visibly, and turn it into what you can see, visibly, I have to wrestle with the invisible.
“Really?,” you might be asking yourself. “He goes to all that trouble just to play word games?”
I won’t deny that this appeals to me, but developing has some other advantages. It takes less time than shipping it off to a lab. The smells tickle old memories; I spent a lot of time in darkrooms in my teenage years. And once again, I’m engaged in a craft with tools that I can manipulate. Without writing a plan, circulating it to a dozen people, holding five meetings, and cajoling a team into implementing, I can accomplish something.
This way lies madness; I could continue along to 19th-century technology where I prepared my own plates and had no dependence on a film factory. I could prepare them with ether. That’s bound to be popular with Karen.
If feel the need to achieve that level of autonomy, I think I had better go learn to draw. Or get some fresh air.
Anyway, here are a few recent results with the 4×5 camera.
In contrast, here’s an image shot with a 6×9 folding film camera that fits in my pocket.
While there is pleasure in working with simpler tools, sometimes the complicated tools let me make things that I’m not otherwise capable of.
Note that I’d never claim that no one could get this image with film (not to mention oil paint), just that I don’t think that I could.