Old dogs can’t learn new tricks? Sure they can. They just prefer the old ones.
In her famous essay on photography, Susan Sontag wrote, “Humankind lingers in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age old habit, in mere images of the truth.” I’ve had the habit of making images, photographic ones, and reveling in them for close to sixty-eight years.
Some years ago I held a solo photographic exhibit called, In a Black and White World,. the exhibit hung at the Academy Art Museum in Easton. It’s not a black and white world any more. Photography has gone digital and produces mostly color.
Film and darkroom photography is an old trick, a technique that will soon be as obsolete as Mustard Plasters and Burma Shave. The method is cumbersome and sometimes toxic. Photographs generated by digital means are far more efficient and clean than the darkroom. Digital also allows the photographer unlimited control over the images. Given new technology, this evolution in photography is natural and proper. However I mourn the passing of the old way.
I once heard a story about a rural Indian tribe that lived high in the hills. To gather water for their crops the tribe spent most of its day going down to the river, gathering water in buckets and passing the buckets up, person to person, to the top. There the water was dispensed on rows of crops. Some Westerners, seeing the labor-intensive way the tribe lived, encouraged and helped them build a motorized irrigation system. It worked well and crops flourished. Now they had all the time in the world. The tribe, however, after a short time, began exhibiting signs of lethargy and depression. The men began drinking heavily, were quarrelsome and children misbehaved. Wives nagged their husbands.
No one appreciated how intimately the lives of the people had been woven around fetching water. While the new irrigation system was far more efficient, it ended their way of life that contained a particular network of meaning.
I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find the chemicals and papers that I’ve used for years. I’m reminded daily that the art of darkroom photography is on the way out. For all this I’m no more quarrelsome than usual. I don’t drink more. I haven’t misbehaved and my wife doesn’t nag me. But I am aware of how stressful the psychological and spiritual adjustments are when we can’t do the things we’ve loved the way we always have. The renewed search for meaning becomes a significant piece in resolving the challenge.
Our world changes with dizzying speed. Obsolescence is the name of the game. We’re challenged to find meaning and purpose in the evolutionary parade that inexorably marches on.
There’s a growing prominence of minorities in American culture, particularly Hispanics. We have the Internet, and the technological advances in science and medicine. There are also shifting religious attitudes since 9/11, a declining confidence in social institutions we once venerated and an anxious concern for the safety of young people. Add to this a burgeoning population of seniors that is expected to live well into its eighties and beyond and it’s clear to me, like it or no, we dogs, young and old, will have to learn new tricks.
I suspect the art of dealing with change wisely lies in being open to the future while salvaging the best of the past. Whatever treasured ways we may have practiced over the years, although now less viable, most contained an essence, some timeless value we can continue to hold onto and cherish as we move on. Classical photography as I’ve experienced it is a case in point.
Unlike digital photography where the visual feedback is immediate, in classical photography, waiting and uncertainty were the signature features of the photographic experience.
For example, I see a potential picture. I pre-visualize it in my mind’s eye. With my camera I trip the shutter. But I have no idea what I have caught on film, only the hope, and the possibility. Taking the picture is only the beginning. In the darkroom I wait again for the negative image to emerge from chemicals. It looks OK, but I’m not sure how it will print out. I then print it. The final image may turn out beautifully or it may be disappointing. In the meantime the task demands of me that I live expectantly, sustaining my hope throughout that something good and exciting will emerge but with the caveat that it may not. In either case I won’t know for some time. If my hope is disappointed, I’ll simply pick up and start again. Sooner or later, I know that I’ll find what I’m looking for.
I am not alone in feeling that the classical black and white photographic process has similarities to the dynamics of the spiritual journey. As in the mystic’ meditations, the practitioner of classical photography is continually considering light and darkness that falls along his path. He looks into the shadows and at the highlights for some shape; the meaning it communicates in the various ways darkness and light play off one another.
Photographer friends chide me. They think I’m an incorrigible Luddite: “Get a life, George, go digital.” ” Yeah, yeah,” I say but I just blow them off. I can’t imagine generating images on a computer. But in my heart of hearts I know things change. As I address those changes over time I will take with me some of the precious moments in the darkroom when an image in the developer emerged from darkness into light and I yelled, “Yes, Yes” because I knew I had found just what I had been looking for. For this old dog, my memories of the magic of those old tricks will be a treasured part of me for the rest of my life.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.