The Devil's Bargain

The other day, a diabolical question occurred to me.  If someone came up to me and said, "I will give you a digital Leica M(240), but you must then give me all of your old, film Leicas," what would I do?

Well, the first answer was that I should demand two M(240)s, partly because one always wants a backup, and partly because I like to have a camera with a second lens ready in a quickly developing situation.  (The best quote on this came from TIME magazine photographer Terry Ashe, who said: "If you're changing lenses, you're just watching.")  That, however, is more of an aside than an answer.  And let us take as given that this is not some tricky genie figure; there is no dark underside to the bargain.  Straight up trade: digital M for film.  What do you do?

I'm surprised at how difficult it is.  The practical me screams to take the deal and run before he figures out what he's done.  I've often wondered how long film can hold out.  Part of me says forever -- after all, you can still arrange to shoot Daguerreotypes if you want -- and part of me says it's time is limited in any sort of practical way.  Film, after all, requires factories to make it, and factories require film corporations, and those companies ain't looking to healthy these days.

But the other part of me clings to old equipment and techniques like a monk in the Dark Ages, holding on to the last copies of Aristotle and Plato while the peasants outside demand the paper for kindling.  Besides the old Leicas, I have a Rolleiflex and a Speed Graphic, and I use them when I can.  In the days when it appeared film would last forever, old gear was an exercise in technique.  I bought the Speed Graphic, for example, when it occurred to me that every great news photo I had ever seen that was made before, say, 1950 was shot with one.  How did they do it?

This leads to a secondary question: Why the Leica M?  You can get into one of those pseudo-philosophical debates about this -- you know, the kind you used to sit up all night arguing about in college?  Depending on your social class and cool factor, it could be about whether the Beatles or Stones were better, or whether Superman would beat Batman, but in the end you usually come down passionately on the side of something.

Leica users are notoriously obsessive about our cameras, and there are even crazier subsets, like those who will only use film, or think the best were the old screw-mount lenses, and so on.  And there is a collector market, which buys only pristine Leicas, preferably in the original box, only to keep them on the shelf. 

And Leica fanatics are willing to pay.  Recently, an M3 custom modified for LIFE photographer David Douglas Duncan (one of only four like it in the world) became the most expensive non-prototype camera ever auctioned, at a little over $2 million.  And it was pretty beat up, having been to Vietnam and back.  (There's a great story about that, the short version of which is when Duncan returned from covering the siege at Khe San, he went straight to the LIFE offices, still in his camouflage fatigues.  He had stored his Nikons safely in Da Nang as he left Vietnam, anticipating his return, but brought the Leicas with him.  The Nikons were stolen.)

By the way, The most expensive camera, period?  Yep, it's also a Leica.

I, for one, am a lover of the Leica M series, and I actually have given some -- okay, probably far too much -- thought into why.

Generally, my first reaction was like that of Rikard Landberg, who wrote about it on Steve Huff's blog.  When I look through the rangefinder, I see differently.  I see pictures I don't perceive when blasting away with an SLR.  I know what a 50mm lens -- normally a focal length that bores me -- I know what it is for when I put one on a Leica.  Like this guy.

Henri Cartier-Bresson described the camera as an extension of himself.  And this was driven home to me when -- remarkably late in my use of the M -- I learned that the viewfinder for the M3 (set to show a "normal" 50 mm view) can be put in front of the right eye while the left is kept open.  Then you perceive the world as you would with normal, binocular vision ... but with frame lines added.

But let's get back to the point, because the M fascination gets directly to it: the new M(240) is a direct descendant of the M3.  It has the same mechanical rangefinder for framing, the same bayonet lens mount that takes lenses from the 1950s as easily as the newest 35mm aspherical f/1.4 just released from the factory in Solms, Germany.  Aside from my pretentious ability to hold up an M3 and proclaim that it has no batteries at all, the photographic experience is, as near as I can tell before handling the new M, exactly the same.  Just digital.

So why cling to yesterday's technology?  Because there's something about film.  For one thing, it sticks around.  I can still locate 20 or 30-year old negatives and use those pictures.  The ones on last year's crashed hard drive?  Gone forever.

And there's the experience, the feeling, the old timey craftsmanship of using it.  I touched on it at the end of an earlier posting, with a reference to a blog by Vincent LaForet, who went into more detail as it was a longer leap back for him.  And there's the look, but frankly one can reproduce that in Photoshop (where my pictures pretty automatically go after the negative is scanned anyway.)

So why cling to the old cameras?  Why, when I envision the moment of the deal, do I see my hands clinging to those worn bodies of their own accord, refusing to let go?

What You Do ...

There's a saying: Morality is what you do when no one is looking.

I got to thinking about that the other day, when a Facebook friend posted a blog link that coined a phrase I plan to callously steal: The Vivan Maier Test.  It's an interesting piece in and of itself, and you should follow the above link to read it, but it got me going on a tangent.

Lately, you see, I've continued to shoot stills on film, but I haven't the money to process the film (or, for that matter, buy new film -- much of what I have shot lately has been on old stuff that's been aging like fine wine in my fridge.)  Yet I still do it, because ... well, because that's what I do.  I am a photographer, and this takes me to The Vivan Maier Test.

She, as you hopefully already know, was the Chicago nanny who had quietly and privatly shot thousands of photos, apparently for her own amusement.  The quality of the stuff is, frankly, stunning, yet she was completely unknown until some of her negatives were sold in a storage bin auction.  Soon there will be a documentary on her story.

Anyway, here's the point: she shot this stuff without an outlet, apparently without any viewers at all for that matter.  She seems to have done it, I guess, just for the creative satisfaction of it.  How ... pure.

It makes me think of discussions I used to have with friends in college. Mind you, this was in the late 70s and early 80s, so the big media were magazines and newspapers and stuff like that.  One friend had found the rate for a full-page ad in TIME -- some astronomical figure that sounded like the yearly income for a common worker.  With a little additional math -- models, transportation, other accessories -- we figured a major ad campaign ran up six figures of costs alone pretty quickly.  Again, in the early 80s.  So, we laughed, when a top photographer demands thousands of dollars before he even picks up his camera ... well, as a percentage of total cost, that wasn't so much.

But that was an image and phrase that stuck with me: He won't even get out of bed unless someone writes a check for X-thousand dollars.  Frankly, it was an appealing image.  It engendered dreams of a luxurious life in a beachfront hammock.  "How much?  Oh, very well ..."

However, either age or the changing times has shifted me toward the purity of Vivian Maier ideal: to shoot because it needs to be shot, to make a picture for its own reasons.  I wouldn't turn down the thousands -- and it could be argued that the shift for me has been in some way inspired by the profound absence of people offering hundreds, let alone thousands, for my presence -- but there is a true nobility and grace and beauty to the idea.

Apparently, this is a growing feeling.  David Burnett recently did a quick posting on the joys of film, and Vincent Laforet just blogged on a similar experience.  "Somehow, for the first time in awhile, the end result – the resulting 'still photograph' was beautifully overshadowed by the pleasure I felt with the simple act of 'taking my time,'" he said about going out with film as part of a challenge.  But, you see, he still needed to be challenged.  I'm talking about a compulsion.

So, I am a photographer, and I'll keep shooting pictures, ideally with the cameras I'd like to use and on the media (film or digital) that I wish, but I'll do it with whatever I can, even if it's out-of-date film that I can't afford to process. 

I Dream a Perfect World...

I had the most remarkable dream the other day. It wasn't unusual in its form -- just one of those false awakening dreams. Surely you've had one, where you dream you've awakened in your bed ... only to then really awaken, surprised to find the previous was only a dream? I've had them often enough that I frequently have a moment of questioning the reality: Is this really waking up, or just a dream? How do I know? (And, no, I've not seen "Inception" yet, though I know there's something about a top involved...)

So I woke up, and rolled to a sitting position to look out the bedroom window. It was hard to see out -- the shade was pulled over sheer curtains, though the fuzzy outlines of the buildings outside could be seen. I looked down at the dark narrow plank floor, then tried to see better out the window, to get oriented in the flat, pale dawn light. My wife still slept by me. Our parents were in the small houses nearby, where we'd moved them from our old house in Lexington. There were a few other houses visible through the shade, not as silhouette, but as obscured, fuzzy impressions. It felt real. Totally real. "Well," I said to myself, "It might not be the idealized Lexington, but at least it's Lexington."

Perhaps that needs explaining. I've come to realize that, in dreams, I have idealized or compacted versions of places -- a Lexington with fewer streets, a DC with the areas I frequented all pushed together so they abut -- basically places with all the irrelevant details edited out. Sometimes they're idealized; my dream Georgetown more resembles a set for a production of "Oliver!", with texturally aged, brick townhouses with dark wood porches made of thick, craggy beams, all pushed together over quaint alleys and the canal, than it does the actual neighborhood. Anyway, the point of my thought was that I'd decided my morning felt real enough, even when I looked past the foot of the bed to the large, glass doors opening out to a balcony, a town on the hillside below resembling something in Italy more than southwest Virginia. And that's when I really woke up...

And that all pretty much serves as preface to my organizing my film -- as in the stuff I put into my still cameras -- because I've been doing that around the edges of work and family care lately. You see, as we abandoned our old house, we let the utilities go, including electricity, which in turn allowed the refrigerator in which I kept my film defrost. What ice that had caked into it then, of course, melted, soaking all the film boxes. So now, I have to go through all the film, dispose of the boxes to wrecked by water to save (as well as get rid of what film was ruined), but first get the expiration dates off the boxes and write them with a Sharpie on those little plastic film cans.

Okay, that's a lot of background to get to a moment of revelation...

I walked into my room in the midst of the extended process the other night, I looked down on the sea of film canisters ... and felt an odd pleasure. As I later told a colleague at the station, if you had come to me in college, and said that, in 30 years or so, you will be sorting through scores of film canisters on an Afghan war rug, your Leicas nearby, I would have taken that as a promise of absolute success.

A part of a documentary including Larry Burrows, one of the greatest war photographers. Note about 1:34, the scene of him pulling film canister after film canister out of the box to carry with him into the field with his Leicas. This still gives me a unique thrill, to see an idol doing something so similar...

As with so many things, this seems like the story of the genie: I get exactly what I wished for ... but not really in the way I wished. I don't know whether to be ecstatic or depressed...

The Way We Live Now...

So, even though I'm still editing the VMI New Market project (using an usual system of editing video as a "silent movie" in essence first, then going back to the interviews to create a narration of sorts -- exactly the opposite of the usual method), I've already started filming on another project.

This is Phil Welch, a woodworker -- really an artist who works in wood -- here in Lexington. I first met him at a party, hosted by someone who had commissioned one of his works: a table in with, instead of conventional legs, a bumble bee's head and legs. It was a really impressive piece, in various tones of wood. In other words, no stain or paint, just different wood tones providing the color.

At the time, I thought that watching the creation of such a complicated piece -- not to mention the artistic effort that went into it -- would be really interesting. So I suggested to him that, next time he had a good commission to work on, he should let me know so I could film it from start to finish.

This is Phil's drawing for the commission he called me about: a large jewelry box in the shape of a woman. The final piece will be only slightly smaller than life size, with a torso serving as the box, about a foot-and-a-half or two feet tall. I guess the final piece will be about five feet tall. It will hang from brackets on a wall.

The drawings, as perhaps you can see here, are not really detailed diagrams, but more a way for him to work through ideas. Nothing is set until he really starts working the wood. However, wood being wood, as he has explained to me, once you commit to a certain shape and structure, you're pretty committed.

Here he shapes a leg. He rasps and sands the pieces like this by hand, slowly drawing the shape he wants out of the wood.

Phil's actually very humble about my film. He constantly wonders what it is that he's doing that might be interesting to watch, and constantly apologizes for, as he puts it, "not much happening" as I film. Meanwhile, I'm looking through the lens and watching him think and create ... long pauses as he stares at the wood, then rasps, then touches, then rasps again, then looks, steps back, steps in. It's really quite exciting in its way. If he only knew.

Also, I have to say he's a delight to interview; the absolute opposite of a bad interview. No question goes unanswered or inadequately considered. "What are you doing today?" might lead to an extended philosophical consideration of whether what he's doing should really be considered "art", or just "artisan" or maybe even plain old "work." Or it might just result in a review of his efforts. Usually both...