Category: art biz

Darkroom Death

Posted on Posted in art biz, minimum daily requirement, paradox lost, the Lab, The Other

Without hybrid, there is no breed..

The analog rebound is more in the mind than in the hand. A rebound that never recovers to a prior high is termed a “dead cat bounce” — as in, “even a dead cat can bounce.” The Analog Revival is a low point in revivalism. This is a dream of those with more past than future. More memory than plan.

The companies, groups that lasted —

Freestyle and Lomography kept supplies flowing, now, CineStill has become strong enough that Eastman Kodak sees revenue. The new companies, those providing film scanner solutions, those automating the wet steps, these are the small cadre looked to by the incoming users. The green, energized under 40s. They may come to a darkroom, but by the time they do, products will be so expensive, only the richest, or most dedicated will buy. That is apt to be the shortest lived bounce.
Without digital, film would never have been revived.

The resuscitator was Instagram photos of camera carrying celebrities. *Lauren Lauren’s Leica, with very long leather strap. Brad Pitt’s Hasselblad 500.

November 24… Another camera/ film store closing

Mechanical Analog Chemical Photography was built assuming a darkroom in which the unseen, slow, contemplative work was undertaken, or realized. The camera was the first part, not the key distinctive part. Even today, that public, camera centric portion of photography continues. It has been rephrased as “lens based” photography, thereby including the digital camera, the spine of 21st century imaging.

items of the fad aren’t always well made.. fads fade… more times than they succeed.

People want to believe. A gathering of the loud, too easily believe they are heard by everyone. They aren’t heard, even among themselves. Instead, believing their arguments of importance. In the land of money, there are no other motives by those who make the machines used. Fads are opportunities for advance which the foolish think are permanent, an annual. Wiser money understands the difference between crops; between land, soil types. When it is better to reap, or sow. Money is only money when it is mobile.

Will a new coater arise? Yes. But they won’t have a stronger future than the existing coaters. They will have to remain small scale, surviving only if their best first product exceeds anticipation. And/Or, they have physical barrier… a close, local market. Perhaps one offering camera rentals, tea, tours of a surrounding area — a destination site for the young, perhaps the retired.

Without paper and associated chemistry, the darkroom will die. Already, the range of coaters capable of absorbing the possible losses involved in coating and distributing photo-sensitive paper declines. Fujifilm is the only company financially durable enough to risk making papers Their remaining paper interest is in supplying European ready printers — amateurs. Fujifilm is paying attention to Instax coating in their homeland, where enthusiasm, free time, disposable cash, continues growing among the young city people. The visual Karaoke, seems durable. If not, a small write-off to a company Fuji sized.

The Forum Effect–

Forums provided no benefit on any dye transfer revival. It was actually a diffuser of intensity, by allowing people to believe that someone else was doing it — that there was a grand benefactor in the sky. They didn’t have to invest anything more than they ever had. Wait long enough, someone will realize how fabulous a market there is, just awaiting new product.

Even now, forums focus on cameras, old lenses, attempts at digitizing –just as bad salesmen never improve, neither will they. Dispersed, disorganized information leaves the field open to more brag than awareness.

Forums are a remarkably fertile field if you are interested in becoming an old, white male, having strong opinions about photography prior to 1980; before its growth, before the silver explosion, when it makes it way into commercial galleries. Opinions formed using knowledge gained in piecemeal fashion.

People buy tickets to ride steam trains. They get there flying in a jet, or driving in a car. Steam trains are not making their way onto the tracks of life.

REFS:

If You Knew Dye Transfer

Posted on Posted in art biz, artgame, da net, dye transfer, visual mindTagged , , , , ,

How many times must a process die before you learn why? The insistence is common, consistent, durable — it lasts longer than the process itself. People of the Net hold the belief that dye transfer would be resurected, successfully, if peopls could see how fantastic it was, particularly in this age of terrible stuff.

You have to see it to believe it… You have to believe it to see it. Is that true in the case of dye transfers?

The role played by product names in art appreciation is high at the sales table, and among the foremost forums. 

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”
— Walter Benjamin

… understand the magic …

Dyes were seen and made by hundreds in the era of Photograph as Object suited to gallery and museum. The growth years of photography in art schools — 1975 – 1995.

Even still, it failed, being superseded by other processes. Direct to print processes such as Type Rs (Cibas, too) for Slide to print. And, Type Cs (chromogenics, RA-4s)for Negative to print. This later printing mode strikes hardest, since Kodak Pan Matrix film was introduced with Kodak masked color negative film

the advantage of real world experience is that is is real.
i read history in the bathroom; philosophy in the bedroom; poetry in the kitchen

If you knew it was a dye transfer would it interest you more? One group of people have made dye imbibition prints over the past decade. Have shown them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Brooklyn, London … never calling them Dye Transfers, instead, they were dye prints, or ink transfers, and similar names. Some prints were sold, but so too were Epson Inkjets, Fujifilm RA-4s. Without making these as dyes, they sold as images. This was the basic interest of the collective group that had gone to the trouble of learning to make dyes. By make, understand that this meant having matrix film produced again.

Why did they keep this a secret private among themselves?

what would you rather talk about: process or *c, where *c is being defined, refined. Who asks, who would you be limited to talking too, with, if the topic were “process”.

Most people diffuse their interest by a bit of gossip. That mannerism is what diminishes a process to the point of pointless conversation.

Would people dive into dye transfer if given the chance? Nope, one [J* 826 ] of the Neu Ds posted on LFPF, offering a complete working dye transfer lab, including supplies… even going so far as saying she would meet them at an upcoming conference. No one, not even the loudest of counter pounder experts on dye transfer, and all topics color.

2011: 3 students
   ‘12 : +3
   ‘15 : +8