The last roll of film

Once upon a time I was going to be a photographer, but that was forty years ago.

Below are a few pictures from my last roll of 35mm film taken a couple of years ago. The Olympus OM1 with which they were taken sits in the cupboard alongside the rest of our family camera collection dating back more than a hundred years. There is also a digital camera too, now only used when a smartphone camera won’t do!

In 1977 I gained an ‘A’ level in Photography, one of the first few hundred students in the country to do so. The exam had a history paper, as well as a technical one and of course there were the practical assessments. Back then it was a popular cliché to call photography ‘the art form of the 20^th century’. The technology has changed since then, but have the attitudes, motives and actions of photographers - the decision making process that leads to the release of the shutter and the fixing of a moment?

Equally the product, do we still believe the still image, does the illusion which everyone recognises, still appeal as curiously realistic? The apparent realism of the medium seems to have always been at the heart of arguments over its value. Do commercial users still depend on the perceived representation of reality, whilst artistic users merely take reality as a point of departure?

The subject, viewpoint, content, colour, tone and mood are all at the total discretion of the photographer. The greater the belief in the realism of photography, the greater its power to deceive. Whatever the application, the nature of the medium remains the same.

Perception, interpretation and manipulation is a technical process which must be learnt but which may, given enough time and practice, come to feel seamless and instinctive, leading to the release of the shutter at Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ or the decision to fix a print. Only once the craft skills are achieved, do questions about motivation and freedom of expression come to the fore. The loss of such a craft perspective led Lord Snowdon to comment; ‘To the untrained eye it is muddling to distinguish between what is acclaimed at art schools and rejected at Kodak.’

Equally it is possible to believe absolutely in one’s own version of reality, leading Andre Kertesz to assert; ‘I don’t create anything. It is life that creates what I am photographing.’ I think I’d rather stick with Ansel Adams; ‘There is no such thing as reality in graphic expression. ..What is important is how the photographer saw the subject and how he visualised the final print.’

Kodak alas is no more, it was their introduction of the ‘Box Brownie’ in the 1880’s which put a camera in the hands of anybody. Whilst the miniaturisation of high quality cameras in the 1920’s and 1930’s allowed for the apparent realism of the social document. Now the great picture libraries are in the hands of corporations who mine them for prints by the star names which can then be sold for thousands of pounds as art - once they appeared in mass circulation magazines seen by almost everybody.

Although today the technology of stills photography is handed out free to almost everyone, the ability to add value still depends on individual skill. Mobile devices give us the ways and means, but not the eye to see. If done well, it can still have the power to change what everyone sees!

(To see the result of my efforts with a smartphone camera visit my Facebook Albums.)

So some highlights from the last roll of film…