film can’t save you

I've been taking photographs professionally for over 40 years. I don’t understand the current nostalgia for film photography. I’ve shot it all and I can assure you a modern digital workflow destroys all film based photography. People seem to think that the ‘process’ of film photography is somehow more authentic than digital; that some magical thing happens when you put a roll of plastic in the back of a camera. Nonsense, the medium does not make magic, you do.

Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus, Lee Miller, man ray, Eugene Smith and all the other the great film photographers of the 20th century would have killed for the convenience, sophistication and efficiency of digital photography. Film is a 100 year old technology that is expensive, awkward and polluting. I never want to dip my fingers in a film tank ever again. Using this redundant technology to make a career or make your art is pointless and irresponsible. Of course digital has an environmental impact too (everyting does), but at lease there are no chemicals going into the ground water.

Yet, when i say this to earnest wide eyed young photographers they look at me like a crazy old heretic.