Film or digital? Two images, one shot on film the other digitally, can you tell the difference? Both are medium format, both shot at ISO400 and both at f/4 although there is a difference in focal length and thus in the depth of field. Can you tell the difference, do you prefer one over the other, do you care?
Image A
I feel we are at the point where we run the risk of over romanticising film and pushing it towards pretention and affectation. Shooting film doesn’t automatically make your images better, more interesting or more compelling (as these two versions of an otherwise dull composition illustrate) and yet the cult following that a few overtly analogue photographers have garnered suggests otherwise.
Image B
Having shot film I can appreciate the virtues of the process and how that can change the output and become something personally very important to the photographer. But that experience is just that, it’s personal to the photographer in the moment they make the image and is irrelevant to anyone else viewing the image, for the most part at least.
There does come a point when the aesthetic beauty of the image encourages you to want to understand how it was made; Richard Learoyd would be a perfect example of this, highlighting the fact that the very reason these images look as aesthetically beautiful as they do is precisely because they were made in the way they were. But then, the substrate on which Learoyd records his images is perhaps less relevant than the size of the image plane on which the recording was made (notwithstanding the fact that it would be almost impossible to create a digital recording surface that large).
Don’t get me wrong, process is clearly a key variable in the quality of your work and in so far as an analogue process contributes to that quality, we should romanticise the virtues of film over digital. My point is, is that it is not necessary to produce great work; your process can be just as effective shooting digitally. Why then do we care so much about the substrate; why are there so many channels, publications and even competitions that will specifically exclude one set of images purely because of the substrate on which they were captured? It’s almost as bad as judging someone’s work based on their gender! Oh wait, hang one, we do that one as well don’t we…..