Analogue Photography Quotes

If there's no mystery, it's not it. It just doesn't feel right. When something's mysterious, then it's the real thing. I think so. What is a photograph? It's something back there, even further, behind that question...

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays the quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape - everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) - above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

It is easy to underrate how long it takes to implement a new idea. Researchers estimate that it takes 30 years for a groundbreaking development to progress from initial idea to a commercially viable product. Middle management often extols the value of short-term strategies that react to market circumstances. Kodak used short-term strategies to keep its analogue photography business going. But the expression 'short-term strategy' is in fact an oxymoron, because trying to reach short-term goals is not strategic by definition.