I was jarred awake by my 4:55 am alarm.
I slowly and groggily got up with a moan and a sigh, but I was also full of the same excitement and hope I am for every day I get to wake up again. That’s not a joke either, we all have our depressed seasons, and I’ve certainly had mine, but mostly, I’m pretty excited about waking up every day despite the mornings being cold and my bed being warm.
I shuffled to the kitchen. Coffee Time. Writer of the show Billions and host of The Moment podcast Brian Koppleman calls the first cup of coffee of the day “The Royale”. (Not to be confused with a French Quarter Pounder at McDonalds). It’s that first creative jolt I get from The Royale that fuels most of these podcasts.
I’ve used a Chemex to make coffee for about 9 years now. Pour over coffee takes time, but I think there’s enough scientific evidence of the benefits of a handcrafted cup of coffee at this point. I once read a Yelp review that someone wrote about an Italian restaurant in a small town: It was a lament. The writer wasn’t angry about the formerly frozen Fizzoli’s-esque Italian meal he had at this restaurant, but rather, he used his short blurb to mourn for the people in the small town, that this was all they knew. He wept for them. That’s how I feel about people who still drink instant coffee in a Bunn coffee maker.
It’s a bad habit, but I always hit the phone in between pours. Gotta check out what happened past 9 PM last night. So I pulled out my phone to check out my daily Google alerts that I have set for all the things I’m interested in.
Suddenly, the earth began to quake.
In the first episode of this podcast, I talked about how I had a weird feeling about the state of photography. It just feels like the end of an era of some kind. Like flood gates are opening, destroying everything we knew and replacing it with…something else.
Two big things happened in the world of photography last week. The first was an NBC story that covered film photographers, interviewing Jason Kummerfelt aka grainydays on YouTube. Oh, the video was shot entirely on film too, by the way.
The video felt weirdly ancient, and not because they shot it on film. It was in that completely unappealing cable news style where you get no real depth into a subject, but you still walk away feeling like you can tell everyone you’re an expert now. Every grandparent you know is about to tell their grandchildren that some mysterious group of young people named “They” is back at it, and this time, “they” have all switched to shooting film instead of digital now, can you believe that?
Despite the weird out of touch nature of it, it was pretty cool to see film photography of all things be featured on national news. I’m not sure I remember a time where digital photography has been featured on the news other than maybe when a new iPhone comes out or when a wedding photographer gets mad at a rude couple and deletes their photos in front of them at the wedding. Granted, the already insane price of film is about to get more insane since they just aimed an even bigger spotlight on the growing demand, but anyone who buys film has already sold their first born into indentured servitude by now already.
The second thing I saw on my phone which added to my shock: Leica, the company known for those super expensive cameras you want, decided to re-release the Leica M6 camera AKA everyone’s favorite 35mm camera.
In one week, film photography was brought to the mainstream.
It was already creeping up, but I didn’t think that suddenly it would happen like this, like, within two days of each other.
Film photography has been living on this weird edge for a while, where it was even on the fringes of photography. Now, a big camera company is releasing a new $5,000 film camera, and an analog photography YouTuber was interviewed on your grandparents TV. Weird times, man.
This is a cool development though I think because it broadens the definition of photography, which has been a weird focus of mine lately.
What I mean is that, “photography” and the “photography industry” doesn’t really exist. Photography is so big at this point, and there are so many different facets of it.
This is a tease for an upcoming episode, but the industry is so siloed that there really aren’t “famous photographers” like there used to be. Photographers are pretty much only famous in their own universes nowadays- just try to ask your dad to name famous photographers he knows. How many of them are still alive?
Any time I tell people I’m a photographer, I always get asked, “Oh, so you shoot weddings?” And then I have to do all this work to explain, “No, I’m not that kind of photographer….”
That makes sense, because most people only interact with a photographer for family events, so the label “photographer” has been co-opted by that one particular lane of photography.
But now, because of NBC, those people will ask “Oh, you’re a photographer? Like you walk around neighborhoods in LA and shoot 35mm film with your Leica M6? What’s your favorite stock these days? I hear those Portra prices are nuts right now.”
What’s awesome about the 2022 world is that we have all the tools of the past as well as the present. There are no rules or limits on what we can do. Just take a lot of the movies and TV to come out in the past couple years for instance: Mank, The French Dispatch, Blonde, and Better Call Saul. All either have black and white elements or are completely in black and white. Better Call Saul especially was a spin-off of one of the biggest shows in the world, Breaking Bad, and it, for story reasons, had the final 4 or 5 episodes in black and white. It’s not just “indy” stuff that’s doing it. In the past, maybe black and white was the only option, now, if your story needs to be black and white, then why not?