Old dogs can't learn new tricks? Sure they can. Some, like me, just
love the old ones.
In her famous essay on photography, Susan Sontag wrote "Humankind
lingers in Plato's cave, still reveling, in its age old habit, in mere images of the truth." I've been reveling in those images for over sixty-five
years.
I started taking and developing black and white photographs in 1947.
Soon black and white darkroom techniques will be as obsolete as Mustard
Plasters and Burma Shave. The process is cumbersome and sometimes toxic. Photography
has turned digital, a method far more efficient and clean. It allows the
photographer unlimited control over the images. It’s the story of an art that begun chemically
– in the dark - and ending up electronically, in the light. I mourn the passing
of the old ways.
There’s a story about an Indian tribe that lived high in the hills. The natives spent their days going down to the
river, gathering water in buckets and passing the buckets up, person to person,
to the top, where crops were watered. Westerners, seeing the labor-intensive
way the tribe lived, encouraged them to employ a mechanical 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 were quarrelsome and children misbehaved. Wives nagged
their husbands. Their old way of life was gone. They weren’t sure anymore how
to live.
The lives of these people had been woven around the tasks of fetching
water. While the new irrigation system was far more efficient, it ended a way
of life in which the natives had found meaning.
The chemicals and papers that I've used for years are harder to find. My
way of life is inexorably disappearing. I’m not quarrelsome 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 to do the way we always
have. The renewed search for meaning, then, becomes a critical piece in my
spiritual journey.
Dealing with change wisely lies in being open to the future while
salvaging the best of the past. Whatever treasured ways we have practiced over
the years, although now less viable, most of them contain an essence, some
timeless value we can continue to hold and cherish as we move on. My
photographic experience is a case in point.
Digital photography offers immediate feedback. In classical
photography, waiting and uncertainty are the signature features of the
experience. For example, I see a potential picture. I trip the shutter. But I
have no idea what I actually caught on the film. I have only the hope, 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 still
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 will
emerge but with the caveat that it may not. In either case I won't know for
some time. If I’m disappointed, I pick
up and start again. Sooner or later, I know that I'll find what I'm looking
for. The art of living expectantly is also a spiritual adventure. You start in
the dark before you see the light.
As in the mystic's meditations, the practitioner of classical
photography is continually considering the light and darkness that is falling
along his path. She or he looks into the shadows and the highlights for shape, coherence,
the meaning communicated as shadows and highlights play off each other.
Things change. As I address the changes I will bring 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 in those old tricks will be a treasured part of me as I move on in a
changing world.
