Photography, viscerally
After spending two days of my Easter vacation on digitizing old photo negatives from my family’s collection of memories, I felt somewhat cured of the silliness of enjoying analog photography in 2025 (some of which is visible on my photo blog). I was done with futzing around with analog film to get a result that could as well be emulated by my mirrorless digital camera, but that doneness only lasted two days until picking up a strip of black and white negatives, looking at the matte emulsion layer and being able to hold a piece of physical reality in my hands.
I have tamed the hunger for analog photography a bit by having prints made of digital photographs. It satifies a bit of that same pull that looking at negatives has, but the prints are still made digitally whereas the negatives have been phyiscall imprinted by the light at the scene where the photo was taken — the negative was present; it saw the thing!
Fellow enjoyers of analog photography have mentioned that having an acetate negative will outlast digital storage; something that speaks greatly to my desires for archiving and cataloging pretty much everything. However, after seeing hundreds of negatives that have faded over the last 20 years over the last few days, I feel a little bit disenchanted. From what I have read, it seems to be that black and white negatives keep better than colour negatives as black and white chemistry is not based on chemical dyes, but silver hallides in the negatives themselves.
So, for now, I might keep a bit more to black and white photography in the analog realm and keep the colours in digital. In any case, I think that I would have a hard time giving up the very visceral feeling of looking at a photo negative and seeing not only a subject but also a memory. It just works well for me.
