[Leica] Meaning changes over time

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

>>>In my mind, Leica is the direct opposite to digital.<<<

Well, yes...actually, a Leica _screwmount_ with a 50mm Elmar might be
the exact opposite of digital...you get where I've been going here...<g>



>>>Who wants to deal with figuring out what to rewrite?<<<

Precisely. This is a big, big issue that photographers never seem to
talk about, and which they WOULD talk about if they were archivists or
looked at more historical pictures (I was an unofficial "archive
researcher" in my student days in D.C.--all summed up in the comment
made by a guard at the Library of Congress as I left the Prints and
Photographs division at the end of a day: "Jesus Christ, do you LIVE
here?" <g>). I' ve often said that archivists 100 years from now will
have at their disposal thousands of selenium-toned pictures in perfect
condition of just exactly what they do NOT want to see: carefully
composed studies of rocks, trees, and western park landscape.

It is precisely because we do NOT know what is worth saving that it is
imperative that the original images be made to be permanent from the
get-go. Dirck Halstead tells a fascinating story about this on his
website. He says that when the first pictures of Monica Lewinsky
surfaced, he had a feeling he had seen her face before. So he hired a
researcher to go through his archives and see what could be found. After
several days and several tens of thousands of slides, the researcher
found Halstead's famous picture of a smug and happy-looking Lewinsky
hugging the President--a picture that was utterly routine when it was
shot (at some function for interns), but that made the cover of _TIME_
and is arguably the defining image of the scandal.

The interesting part is this: Halstead mentions that he is a big booster
of digital imaging, but he admits that is he had made that photograph on
one of his digital cameras, he would have erased it the next day to
conserve hard-drive space.

Another example: my father used to edit his negatives with a hole-punch.
His idea was that he wanted to edit only ONCE, and not be able to
second-guess himself after the fact; so he'd decide what to print and
put a hole through all the rest.

I tried this for a few rolls. One picture I put a hole through was a
perfectly mundane shot taken at the doorway of our summer home. It
showed a scene I'd seen a zillion times since boyhood: the big old elm
tree, the old wooden dock, and my grandfather's sloop lying at anchor.
Utterly unremarkable. PUNCH.

A few years later, the old elm tree got Dutch lem disease and had to be
cut down, replaced by a stand of young birch; the 70-year-old
canvas-covered dock was retired and replaced with a modern one; and we
gave the sloop to the boys' camp down the shore because my grandfather
had broken his hip and could no longer sail. At that point, wanting a
picture of the way things had been, I went through all my negatives. You
know it--the only one of that scene was the one that had a hole punched
through it.

One of my photography instructors at the Corcoran heard that story and
made me print the negative anyway. My print that shows the scene with a
giant black ball in the sky, like some sort of vast alien spaceball or
an inky black planet hovering over the scene. Moral: you may not know
right away what the valuable pictures are: things change, and the
meaning of pictures changes, over time.

- --Mike