Chiusano Photography

In this post I am going to tie together two seemingly unrelated trends, namely AI and the resurgence of film photography.

The two trends could not seem further apart: in one, you click on some keys and a gigantic computer somewhere makes a picture for you, which you view on a screen; and in another you go through a series of physical steps, time-consuming steps at that, eventually ending with a tangible object, a photographic print on a medium made of wood fibers.

Is it not puzzling to wonder why both of these trends, which appear to be technological opposites, are growing at the same time?

I would argue that the one has created the demand for the other. While AI has made (or should I say “reduced”) photography to button clicks, it has also rebirthed the century-old practice of film photography, in which the process itself, with all of its chemicals and delays, provides a satisfaction of its own.

My studio went through the whole analog-to-digital transition, and in the commercial world today there isn’t much sense to shooting paying work on film. Digital capture and workflow is the way to go.

But now, I’m having a blast shooting film again, and going through all the messy steps of getting the image to a physical medium. In other words, the process itself is fun. Indeed, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in making pictures with antique, non-silver chemicals such as palladium printing, and building and using darkrooms and enlargers is also making a comeback. As the adage goes, “All things old are new again”.

An analogy might be the new trend of writing letters with pen and ink on fine letter paper. People have tired of email, it’s all junk mail anyway, so a handwritten note brings a nice feeling to both the writer and the recipient.

There’s a lesson here: we humans start to get uncomfortable when our tools and techniques diverge too far from what we can touch and feel, what is tangible. A digital image created by an AI program may be easy to make, but it always seems intangible, hence the renewed interest in film photography.