“I chose to shoot the series on a large format film, to give the images a depth and timelessness that I think would have been hard to achieve on a digital camera.”
Spencer Murphy
This is a bit ‘meta’ as it is a post about a post on the blog DG28, a site run by editorial and corporate photographer, Neil Turner, that I responded to. The links to the post, Taylor Wessing 2013 and to Neil’s homepage are at the bottom of the post.
Neil Turner’s post was about the Taylor Wessing Portrait Award and, in particular, winner Spencer Murphy’s comments about his method. In short, Murphy talked about the importance of his use of film (the above quote); Turner’s response critiqued the implied notion that film was a superior medium when the industry itself is so dominated by digital. I weighed in when he brought college and university photography courses into the post in this paragraph:
“The place where this is most frightening is in our colleges and universities where the small resurgence of film is being leapt upon by lecturers who are miles out of their depth in the digital world supported by managers who are desperate to validate their investments in silver based facilities and avoid having to spend on up-to-date digital ones. We have a generation of students being equipped for professional life in the 1980s based on the achievements of a tiny number of photographers achieving critical acclaim by “seeing differently” and then talking nonsense about it to a small clique of art lovers who lap up all of this stuff so that they can repeat it at Islington dinner parties and sound as if they know what they are talking about.”
You can see in my response that I am even-handed and didn’t want to jump on what initially seems an ill-considered and prejudiced ‘Daily Mail’ style argument (even bringing in some fabled Islington dinner party straight from Paul Dacre’s febrile imaginings). I don’t disagree with his sentiment – and he qualifies his view in response to my comment by speaking of his own experience – but the blaming of universities and teaching methods that somehow privilege film over digital capture is such a sweeping statement, it could not stand unchallenged. Here is my response:
This is a good riposte to what I take to be a slightly careless remark by Murphy, who is, like many portrait specialists, a film user (and I like his work and the winning image). I would take issue with the assumption that at universities across the land, tutors are celebrating or perhaps privileging film as a medium above digital. I teach on a photography degree course and know many other tutors at other universities teaching photography at degree level. Not only do I, my colleagues and equivalents at many other universities keep up with current technology, we have to embrace it as part of the job.
It would be fair to say that photography at degree level is one of the last places where teaching of traditional skills is still available and, to an extent, encouraged. In so doing, students are presented with a choice. Much of this has to do with the diversity of practice amongst the students; they often come to us because they want to explore film-based and darkroom practices and these skills are useful and transferable when working in the digital environment. I think a student is in a better position doing say, a digital black and white conversion in Photoshop, Silver FX or Lightroom and then printed on baryta or photo rag paper, if they have first struggled and then achieved decent results with fibre-based printing in the darkroom. But then, maybe I’m a sadist.
Many of the students are looking at the gallery market when they graduate and are often admirers of photographers in that market who use film – primarily medium or large format (Thomas Struth, Alec Soth, Simon(s) Roberts or Norfolk etc.). Equally, we have very good and expensive digital facilities. Most of the students that shoot film, scan it (on Imacon/Hasselblad scanners) and print digitally. We closed our c-type darkroom this year as a response to underuse and will continue to expand our digital facilities in compensation. We are entirely pragmatic and switched-on about what our students need, not hobbled by a romantic attachment to film and the traditional darkroom. I mainly used film myself until about 7 years ago, now I shoot digitally pretty much exclusively.
So the students are encouraged to work in the medium that best suits their work. They all have DSLRs, can borrow from our extensive digital Canon equipment or Hasselblad digital medium format cameras and get workshops in digital workflow to prepare them to work as photographers (in addition to all the other skills in, for instance, marketing and presenting their work). Not only are they assessed by us, but also by high-end industry figures, and they have to work with external clients (often, even the ‘film users’ will switch to digital for this, depending on client expectation/requirement).
But of course, in the end, to restate your point and Homer Sykes’s, it is about the pictures, the ideas and the preparation the student/graduate/photographer has; to present themselves and their work to those who will ultimately publish it, commission it and/or exhibit it. So, some universities may be living in the past; we and many others aren’t.
Enjoy and thanks for reading.
Here is the link to Neil’s site: