Film in the Age of the Endless Feed
Somewhere in the time it takes a roll of film to come back from the lab, the feed has moved on about four thousand times. I have counted, roughly, with my thumb. The images go past at the speed of a held breath, each one finished, graded and forgotten before the next has properly arrived, and I have started to think of that pace as a kind of weather. Not good or bad, just the climate we all live in now.
Film sits in that climate badly, and I have stopped apologising for it.
The obvious complaint about the endless feed is volume, but I don't think volume is the real problem. There were always too many pictures. Every shoebox in every Queensland garage is proof of that. The difference is that the shoebox let a photograph stay put. You could come back to it in ten years and it would be exactly where you left it, a little faded at the edges, the colour of a particular summer. The feed doesn't let anything stay put. It is built so that nothing settles, because a settled thing is a thing you have stopped scrolling past.
Working on film, I live on a different clock. I shoot on a Saturday, the roll sits in the camera for a week because I haven't finished it, then it sits at the lab for another, and by the time the scans arrive I have half forgotten what I was looking at. That forgetting turns out to be useful. I see the frames almost as a stranger would. The ones I was sure about at the time are often the dull ones. The ones I nearly didn't take, a hand on a railing, someone looking just past the lens, are frequently the keepers. A fortnight is long enough to lose the memory of how a moment felt and be left with only what the picture actually holds.
The feed has no room for that delay. It wants the picture tonight, and it wants it with the caption already written. I don't think that's a moral failing on anyone's part. It's simply a different job. But it does mean a negative arrives into the world slightly out of step, like someone walking into a conversation that finished an hour ago.
I have made a sort of peace with being out of step. A few things help.
The first is that I post less than I shoot, and I shoot less than most. A roll might give me two frames worth putting in front of anyone. The rest stay in a sleeve, which is where most photographs belong. The feed rewards constant presence, and I have decided I can live without the reward.
The second is that I try to make pictures that survive being small. On a phone, a photograph is the size of a playing card for about a second and a half. Grain reads as texture at that size, and a strong shape reads at any size. Fussy detail doesn't. Oddly, the constraints of the feed and the constraints of film point in the same direction: simple frames, honest light, one clear idea.
The third, and the one that matters most, is that I keep the prints. A print doesn't refresh. It sits on a desk in the afternoon heat and slowly takes on the room. People pick it up and turn it towards the window, which is a gesture nobody has ever made with a screen.
None of this makes film better than the feed, and I'm wary of anyone who insists it does. Plenty of brilliant work lives entirely on a phone, made quickly and seen by thousands, and it deserves to be. The feed is how most people will meet my pictures too, and I'm grateful when they stop for a moment.
What film gives me is a place to stand while everything else moves. The negative is fixed. Whatever was in front of the lens on that Saturday, in that light, is now permanently there in silver and dye, whether or not anyone ever scrolls past it. That is a strange comfort in an age that treats every image as provisional.
The feed will keep going. It doesn't need me to keep up, and I've stopped trying. The roll in the camera has eleven frames left, and there is no hurry at all.