Analog photography is all about the fixed image - the digital image is entirely different; it is completely fluid.
Someone wiser than me once said this, and I could not agree more. The last time I worked in a darkroom was sometime in the late 1990s, and I still remember the sense of permanence that came with film. You exposed an image, developed it, printed it, and at some point it became something finished. Once the image existed it felt solid, fixed, almost immutable.
Recently, I have been looking for my old colour slides, shot mainly on Kodachrome 64 and Fujichrome 100 in the 1980s and very early 1990s. I found some of them, and several are now on this website. But before they could appear here, they had to be brought into the digital world. First they were scanned, then repaired, adjusted in Photoshop and Lightroom, resized, exported and finally placed into a website environment.
And somewhere in that process, something changed.
They no longer felt quite as solid. The physical slide was still there, of course, but its digital counterpart seemed more transient, more fragile — less like a finished object and more like something that could continue to change.
That is the nature of the digital image. It can be re-edited, resized, recoloured, cropped, copied, recompressed, displayed differently on every screen, altered by software and, now, transformed almost beyond recognition by AI. There is no obvious final state. The image remains fluid.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I do not think there is a simple answer. For me, it depends mainly on whether the process remains true to the photographer’s intention. Photography has never been only about recording reality. It is also interpretation, selection and creation. Ansel Adams made that point very clearly: photography is not simply a means of reproducing what is in front of us; it is a creative art.
And if the purpose is to create images that people can linger over, react to, or perhaps even get a little lost in, there should probably not be too many rules.
Still, I remain nostalgic about photography’s past. There was something reassuring about the physical limitations of film — the finite number of exposures, the waiting, the uncertainty, and finally the object itself. A finite thing in your hand that was not infinitely adjustable. It simply was.
I really need to take my old, dusty Mamiya RB67 out for a ride again soon — assuming I can still find film for it.
Fluidity and creativity belong together. But for reasons I cannot entirely explain, I am still more drawn to old analogue images than to almost anything else.