F O R W A R D

In retrospect, writing about events from the early 1970’s, who could have predicted the almost total demise of film photography world wide within a fifty year span to be replaced by digital wonders producing amazing images many times taken by people with limited or non-existent knowledge of photography. The iPhone had bestowed upon mankind! The death knell was the discontinuance of Kodak’s Kodachrome, the industry‘s standard for color transparency film. Agfa, Ilford, Kodak-household names were contracting. The discipline of the darkroom was also vanishing taking along with it the art of choosing paper grades, cropping, masking, exposure time, filters, dodging and the anticipation of results that delayed gratification alone could bring. Limited are the facilities and opportunities to create art in a darkened room lit only by red bulbs and peopled for the most part by elder citizens unwilling to relinquish past achievements nor to submit to the current permissiveness or ignorance by youngster photographers nurtured on Photoshop, they feel they have the right to move mountains to more visually convenient locations or to create colors that did not exist in what they had seen, imagined or even in nature per se. 

The greatest loss of all was the magic that I can still remember as a young boy watching, for the first time, an image emerge on a sheet of paper in a developing tray slowly becoming a photograph of something recognizable. My generation had “Dektol” for paper, D-76 for film. Today’s generation has the “selfie stick” to show each other where they have been, and what they did there, if anything, when they arrived. 

There is still the need to document the contributions they made in passing. 

March 18, 2016 

Note: Commentary dates written by Mr. Bloom are in italic