09/01/2022
⚫ Why film photography and not digital? | From an interview with Gianni Berengo Gardin
❝ — You are a stern critic of digital technology. Yet you have recently taken some photos with a Leica Monochrom, a digital camera.
— Yes, I took a few shots. The Monochrom gives an exceptional performance, worthy of an optical bench. I gave it a try – just once – for a number of reasons: it has an exceptional grayscale, no flash, and allows you to turn digital files into film… but digital photography still does not interest me.
— Why not?
— First of all for the post-production process, which I find so irksome I cannot stand it. Digital technology offers only two advantages. The first is the ability to immediately send a photo to anyone in the world; this is something that does not interest me at all, because I like to wait a few days before I let anyone see my work. But I do understand that immediacy is a very important aspect for breaking news photographers. The other advantage is the possibility to vary ISO depending on light. But except for those two things, I think everything else is a disadvantage.
— What do you mean?
— First of all, digital technology changes the very nature of photography and the mindset of the photographer: he no longer needs to think, because the machine decides and chooses for him. Photographers – or should we call them “people who take photographs” – now can shoot with their digital cameras as if they were machine guns, telling themselves “Something decent will turn out, and I can always edit it with Photoshop”. By the way, Photoshop represents a very serious threat to the documentation of reality. If any of the images in a photo feature are edited, they can convey a false message that has nothing to do with what really happened. This is why the United States are considering a law that would oblige photographers to declare any alteration of their images, in order to somehow protect and certify the truth.
— Do you see any other disadvantages in digital technology?
— In my opinion it will lead to the end of archives, because only negatives can make up a real archive. We do not know what will happen in the next ten years, and what tools we will have at that point to read digital files… I already have CDs from a few years back that are useless garbage now. And I always work with the archive in mind: I am not interested in making art, but only in documenting and witnessing reality, so I want photos to outlive me, to survive the passage of time so that, many years from now, someone will have the chance to look at them and understand history…❞
