Photograph vs. Image

I took a photograph yesterday. 

What a monumental occasion! No one does that nowadays... There are probably legitimately a bagillion images floating around in the cloud. Notice I said images, I try to use the term photograph and image correctly.

To me a real photograph is well, real. 

Its tangible, I can hold it in my hand. The light that I captured in my camera is my view. It can't be shared on facebook, or instagram filtered. I could develop it myself if I had a darkroom. The process happens before your eyes.

I'll never forget the first black and white print that I made from start to finish.

 I took the film out in the dark. I processed the negatives. I let them dry. I took then took the negatives and turned them into something real. All without any computational power. Nothing got broken down into bytes and bits. Uploaded or transferred. No compression lossage. It was real and raw. And it was in my face. The process of creating a photograph is something that I will always love.

A real chemical reaction to light that will sit in my camera and wait to get developed until I use up all the film. Then I will take it in to get developed. Those darn machines will automate the process. And hell, the incredibly expensive machine will spit out my prints in whatever size I want. 1 hour photo was a pretty big accomplishment now that I think about it. I can hold my photographs. I can show them to anyone in the real world and I can hear what they have to say about them. They can get them smudgy, they will fade. The color will not always look right. But they are above all things, real.

But we needed things faster.

Our patience is dwindling nowadays. If we're not in the loop within five minutes of something happening, then we've lost the opportunity to be first. To get the most likes, to get the most comments, and to get the most pageviews. In this immediacy we live in, images are captured quickly, and seen by millions within seconds/minutes. But we really have taken the photograph for granted.

The photograph is not immediate. 

It will never be  transmitted via frequency. It is a moment in time. With memories attached to it. It can connect you to a time you now can't remember. It will not lie to you. There is no photo manipulation. The ink cannot be warped, twisted, transformed, and enhanced to our liking.  That was what it looked like. That was the real color. That was the real shape of things (So long as you shot 35mm). A photograph is definitive. It will never be overwritten.

It's not just something that you ate for dinner and  want to show your friends how well you can cook. The photograph and the act of taking a photograph tells all those around and involved that this moment will live on past the fleeting grip that time holds on us. We certainly will not remember what we were wearing on that day in 1996 when we went to the zoo. But the photograph we took can tell us exactly that. We were there, mom made us stop what we were doing and took  a photograph of us. Seeing it 20 years later can make us see the changes that have occurred and can bring us back to what it felt like to be 7 years old.

I certainly believe that digital images can have a similar effect. But honestly, can you take out your external hard drive with photos from 1996, and hand it to someone to flip through...

They each have their advantages. I cannot make everyone switch to film. Nor am I trying to mount a campaign to do so. But I feel that the process and meaning of a photograph carry so much more weight than an image of yourself in the mirror, cell phone in hand. I will certainly be using my digital camera and film camera in the future.