35mm … Film … KodaChrome … Photomat drive-thru kiosk …
If any of this is ringing a bell you are obviously not 22 anymore. In a world of phone cameras that are smarter than your 11th grade high school gym teacher, the act of holding a machine up to your eye to take a picture is as foreign as waving your arms to fly.
Yet there is are reasons to step back in time and actually take a picture as opposed to glancing at a subject and jabbing the screen to capture an image. It certainly isn't convenience, you can't immediately post it to FakeBook or InstaScam. It won't capture movement or sound so you can make your friends jealous for not being where you are. It just makes a noise that you hope will one day become an image printed on a piece of paper that you can look at.
Photograph - photo meaning light and graph meaning picture. A picture made with light. Hopefully, also with more than a small amount of thoughtfulness.
Thoughtfulness is the key. You have to remember to take it with you. You have to remember to bring extra film. Unlike a phone with it's nearly unlimited image capacity, there are only 24 or 36 images per roll. You have to ration them. Instead of just taking random shots and hoping one will come out OK, you have to think about what you want to achieve with your light picture.
It's slow and that's the key. Instead of whipping out the ubiquitous phone and machine gunning a scene at arm's length, you bring the camera to your eye and peer into a little replica of the world in front of you. It's a tiny piece of that world surrounded by black. As you move the camera the scene changes and you start to see details you had missed at first. A tree that seems to be growing from the top of somebody's head, a face in the crowd that seems misplaced, a child's smile that is there, gone, and back again.
A long time ago I was invited to take a master class with Edward Villella. He spoke as much about the philosophy of dance as he did techniques. Most importantly for me was his discussion of The Point of Innocence. That is, that point when all artifice and ego have drained away leaving only the purity of art.
As you peer through the viewfinder into the world in front of you there is a point when you see clearly that moment when a child's smile is not just shining but is radiant. With a little practice you come to know when that moment is coming and you wait for it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson called it the decisive moment. He said,
He said: "Photographier: c'est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l'organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait" ("To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.").
This decision to make a photograph rather than grab a shot, to take time instead of a random instant, is what makes a great photograph.
Not all photos on film are great works of art and there are digital images worthy of museums. The difference is time and dedication.
And sometimes just plain luck!
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