I found my stash of old photo magazines the other day.
I knew I had them, I even knew where, but had little interest in digging them up, their usefulness questioned in this period of my digital life, but their sense of preciousness still powerful up to three decades later.
Some of these came at a lull in my photographic journey between film and digital, the odd magazine being the only tentative connection.
Each month the wait would start over with Outdoor Photographer, Camera and Darkroom, Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques (mouthful) later becoming Photo Techniques, Black and White Photographer from the U.K. and others. I have about 100 of them left over from probably 1000 total (and I had other hobbies). The price of some of these was $9.50au in 1995! That would be at least $30 now.
Needing something other than a phone to read at the local coffee shop (next door as it goes), I grabbed a couple randomly while cleaning up, more curious and keen to break the digital zombie habit than anything.
The images reproduced are selected at random, based on the half dozen mags on top of the pile.
The waitress gave me a quizzical look as I sat there, thirty year old mags before me and I may have raised an eyebrow when some articles made me chortle out loud. I am not being dismissive of the content, on the contrary.
She did comment “that’s nice”, but I am not sure if she was talking about the picture, the subject matter, the magazine, the fact I was reading an old magazine and not looking at a phone. Any will do I guess.
The articles were often very technically dated, but some, many even, were prescient in their thinking, almost uncannily so. Many accurate hints and theories were posed about things they did not even have terms for then. Nobody knew what a smart phone was, the web was young, slow and mostly innocent, the kilobyte ruled and many got pixels and pixies mixed up.
Sad I guess that sometimes the people with the foresight and smarts to see clearly into the future can only be appreciated in hindsight, but I guess that’s life (talk to any parent).
Some take aways;
A lot has happened in over twenty years. The ads alone tell a story of enlarger, film and silver paper dominance. Digital is there, but a mysterious curiosity, mostly viewed with reserved distance, even dismissed by some. There are advocates of the process, but they are the “tech geeks”, but not something I had any interest in at the time*.
The camera adds tended to promise something next level as the slow creep of technology started to enable shooters.
Rarely seen in Outddor Photographer that mostly dealt with colour slide film users, the other mags are held up by a pillar or all things darkroom. I had three of the Meopta units, one 35mm colour mostly used as a mono diffuser, a 35mm mono condenser (sharper) and a medium format diffuser (more forgiving) with Schneider or Nikon lenses. A friend and “wise old head” liked these because they were solid Czech designs and once he trued them up they would not shift. All it brings back for me is a dark, hot, smelly darkroom and the eternal enemy dust, with the occasional success.
Tripods were a mandatory tool and big was the only type, camera bags were rudimentary with limited in choice (but always sufficient), Nikon and Canon seemed unassailable, photography was hard, but always seemed worth the effort.
As you learned it just got better and easier, without a constant changing of the rules.
The one area that seems to be more accepted in digital was Photoshop re-touching and colour Printing, both mysterious art forms in their own right in wet process photography, so digital actually seemed easier. Digital printing is ironically easily accepted with a film shooters eye, as the limited quality and added control and creativity fits well into a film printers thinking.
An ad for a Minolta scanner, I seem to remember Nikon and Minolta were the brands to get. People could and did retouch prints back then, but it came under the heading of painting.
Neg scanning was seen by many as still the better digital path, but that won’t last long. One of Kodak’s many miss-steps at this time was helping develop the digital sensor at odds with their own film and paper business. Who knew……. .
One mag, Nov/Dec 2000 Photo Techniques had a “Top 25 Cameras” article. I won’t go into all of them, but a large format film camera tops the list, a Leica M6 is next, then on through the full gamut of film cameras from medium format Mamiyas, Minolta Maxxum 9 which is the highest rated “new tech” 35mm cam, the Canon EOS 1n (not D) comes in at 10, more film cams of all formats, mostly larger formats, some Contax, more Leica, a Pentax and Bronica, some Olympus one classic, one modern, the little Nikon 28Ti that I owned.
Film cameras still dominated thanks to a stubborn U.S. market and possibly the threat of the “Millennium Bug” sewing mistrust of all things computer.
Next we hit a separate sub-division for digital, which is tackled more as systems and concepts than specific cameras.
The Kodak 500 and 600 series “upgraded” Nikon and Canon cams to digital ecosphere, but the Nikon D1 and Coolpix 990, Minolta Dimage RD300 and Olympus C-3030 all make an appearance. It is sobering to think that massive amounts of money, time and energy were put into systems using tens of kilobytes of grunt, not megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes.
With often quaintly naive results, especially when compared to film work of the time it all seemed the realm of the newspaper or alternative artist. To me it was like looking at crayon drawings made by a mechanical hand and having to go oooh-aaah to suit the mood.
I was surprised how many larger format cameras made the list (over half) and that Minolta (later Sony) and Olympus had a decent presence. We wanted quality even at the cost of convenience and 35mm “full frame” was still seen as the baby of formats.
I am also amused by the two time lines I see.
All of the cameras considered old even at the time of printing like many of the Large format cameras, the Pentax LX, Nikon FM2, Olympus OM4Ti, models from Contax, Hasselblad etc seem no older to me now than then. Still valid, complete in their own way, perfectly capable of producing 100% of their promise as long as batteries (if needed) and film can be found.
Some spectacular glass and classic cameras. Still make me excited, even though I have had and relinquished some of these over the years. My wish list at the time would have been a pair of S2’s and a few primes. About the price of a new car.
It is the “front line” tech that looks dated. The Minolta Maxxum high tech wonders, the early Nikon and Canon AF cams, Olympus “bridge” cameras, anything digital. These plastic wunderkind are now ancient relics, the older cameras above are timeless classics that seem immune to times ravages. A friend uses a Nikon D1 as a door stop, in comic reference to it’s $14,000au price tag when bought.He likes to show young shooters his most expensive memory card, a 512mb CF card that cost close to $1k.
He now uses an FM2 made before it and still going strong.
I guess it is like comparing a 1960’s Mustang to a 1990’s Toyota.
The images and printing were sumptuous at the time in Camera and Darkroom, Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques and Photo Techniques, bridging the gap between fine art and a premium technical manual. Outdoor Photographer, another favourite (I kept their annual competition issues) was less so, but still satisfying.
Film was at its height, digital looked crude, clumsy, expensive, complicated, soulless and dull, putting itself into a different, less artistic class all together. A courageous few could see the future, or thought they could anyway.
I was surprised by how dated the images look technically, much of it down to printing limits, but also feel a sense of sadness that the “quality” of the time and our appreciation of it, may be something we have lost. They did the best they could and it fell short of master work prints in a gallery, but it got you there, it transported you. Imagination is a wonderful thing, it was once the internet for most creatives.
Some images are jaw dropping on a visual level, but “soft and dreamy” on a technical one**.
What price perfection?
This is the type of image that would excite, but now seen as cute, maybe even flawed and hardly worth the effort.
The reality is, very few images in the magazines would pass the “perfection” tests we use these days, which is as much as anything the difference between print and screen viewing. Screens, even though they are ironically often small and lower resolution than we could use, do promote a feeling of back-lit clarity well beyond hard copy print. Better? No just more on trend at the moment.
Interviews with master printers like Bob Korn anda show case of their images were a favourite as they show cased the ultimate “end of the line” quality. Well printed and stored, these most likely still exist in all their true glory. The magazine could not reproduce the highlights of this image, but in the real print, they would be there.
Grain was a thing and it was beautiful.
The articles are mostly as philosophically relevant now as then, you just have to shift the technical terms. Some articles are the progenitor of our current thinking like the very first article about, with the western definition of, “Bokeh” (Photo Techniques May/June 1997), the dry wit of David Vestal, the eternal wisdom of old masters, many now gone, photographic rules that still hold true and above all life and all it’s pathways.
Should you shoot mono or colour, single frame or motor driven, large format or small, auto focus or manual? Is an image yours or does it belong to the subject, the time and place, or everyone? Harmless subjects, gentle even.
Sound wisdom, just flipped on its head now.
The problems of the past it seems are the same as now, just perceptions and the combatants change.
The images on the whole seem dated and it is easy to just dismiss them, but on further viewing two things come forward.
They were immeasurably harder to take, so even simple looking images need to be respected for what they were. A fleeting grab of a dancer in poor light with a mystical quality was not the result of saturation, but skill, preparedness, an acceptance of a high waste and cost ratio and often an intuition for what may be, not what can be shot from every angle and the results confirmed immediately.
The long exposure grab of a jetty at night was likely the result of dozens of attempts in cold and possibly dangerous conditions.
It was a time of specialists and obsessives.
Masterworks made with much love and effort, but possibly copied by an iPhone and printed on a home printer now.
Close focus, sharpness vs grain, low light action, lens design, shutter action, long exposure, dynamic range, film limits, ongoing cost***, manual focus vs early auto focus, print processes, film type/brand/S-curve/processing all contributed to the craft, but also it’s limitations. People overcame these limitations with ingenuity, perseverance and a little luck.
Sometimes people even tried to use 35mm for “fine art” level work. The nerve.
This guy shot the White House interior as an architectural photographer with 35mm Kodachrome in 1961! The images above were later work, but basically little had changed.
The second thing is, they were the first.
These images are often either the first of their type by process or by subject matter. We were still exploring, peoples being discovered, places seen for the first time and many of the names I later purchased books of, I first became aware of here.
Most of my larger knowledge came to me through these pages. Always learning and evolving, I could have done worse as a first launchpad for my future, the technical stuff is inert, inflexible, rigid, but the philosophy I am now starting to understand better.
Lots of lessons there.
Respect.
I feel this exercise is different to someone doing the same in the 1990’s looking back at the printed matter of the 1960’s because not just technology has changed. I clearly remember at the start my photographic ambitions being much in line with those before me, the gear just a little newer (or not), but we all wanted the same things and we all had much the same tools.
I wanted to be a world travelling National Geographic photographer like Sam Abell or a landscape master like Michael Kenna or Ansel Adams, much like the generations before me.
Images like these make the world a richer place by existing. The magazines helped give them thirty more years of life in my world and in a very small way, this post is giving some 30 more.
Some are just down right haunting and I doubt could or would be taken like this now.
Since the 2000’s not only has photography changed technically at an ever faster rate, but society and how we see images has changed even more extremely if that is possible. Doing what the last generation did is pointless, even though the retro movement is keeping the old alive longer.
I struggle to define anything photographic these days, because it is all changing so fast. Like fashion, a decades worth of evolution is now a half season flash of retro driven inspiration. Definition it seems is lusted after in modern content creation, just not defining the process itself.
What is gone is gone, which is the burden of those who appreciated it and are lucky enough to be able to remember. What is to come is exciting, but always tempered with that realisation and the future is never immune from the influences of the past.
I consider myself lucky to have experienced photography at its zenith and continue to.
*
I was going to throw these out or gift them, but I think there is still some validity to occasionally perusing them, just as a reminder of things gone that were once highly appreciated and maybe should still be kept in my minds “image bank” to draw from.
*My first digital camera was a third hand EOS 10D and my first computer was bought solely to run Lightroom 2 I think, so I am dating my digital start to about 2009-ish. I had barely even sent an email at that point and I think I am only now approaching the half way point between my film and digital careers. It seems an eternity ago.
**It seems you need to shoot video to want that still.
***It used to be a long term and considered process buying gear, then ongoing running costs, now the industry has successfully trained us to update gear regularly, because actually doing it is effectively free.