So the debate is over (see my rant of the 14th May). The first person to fix a permanent photographic image was Niépce in 1826. What a shame he was a Frenchman. Typical though that it was a rubbish process. 8 years later along comes William Henry Fox Talbot to introduce the worlds first negative allowing the printing of more than one copy of an image. The alternative, the Dageurotype was after all, very limited.
Then along comes Frderick Scott Archer with his wet Collodian process. A great process with sharp images but one that required carrying a darkroom around for every photograph. Studios required an entire production team to produce images on a commercial scale.
We like to think that it's only today that we work in a fast paced competitive world. Take a look at this period in photography and you can see that they were under the same pressures. Someone creates a process to record 4 images on a single plate. More images for your money, or a single image for a quarter of the original cost. Productivity improves, costs fall, prices reduce, and everyone is trying find ways to make money; even resorting to advertising on the back of Carte de Visite's. Today, if you want these type of adverts removed from your photobook, it costs £5!
Then in 1871 along comes the dry plate with the advent of the gelatin coating that remains sensitive after it has dried. This makes photography available to (albeit wealthy) amateurs.
Kodak of course brings photography to the masses in 1888 with 'you take the pictures, we'll do the rest'. I was amazed at the vast number of camera models that Kodak have produced over the years, moving through the range of highest quality to the lowest, allowing access for even the most modest pocket.
It's interesting to see how even in those days Kodak were segmenting the market not just by price, but also in other ways, creating for example, the Vanity Kodak cameras for women.
After the blossoming of a huge number of camera manufacturers, it was again interesting to see the consolidation of the industry into a smaller number of larger brands, many of these Japanese.
Then suddenly Kodak found itself under attack in all its competancies. New films from Japan, high performance cameras forcing them back into the budget range and finally being overcome by the digital revolution that has virtually done away with film.
Some time ago I heard a radio programme where Frederick Forsythe said we should not bemoan changes in technology, nor attempt to save dying trades and jobs. He spoke about buckets. First there were wooden buckets made with staves. When tin buckets were invented, wooden bucket makers went to the wall. And when plastic buckets came along, the makers or tin buckets went the way of the wooden makers. You can't protect wooden bucket makers just because they would lose their jobs.
Its sad to see a great name go to the wall, but it just shows that in a similar way, Kodak's late conversion to digital has been their downfall. Sometimes you have to develop products that will eat your own lunch. It's painful, but if you don't do it, someone else will. Nikon and Canon didn't have film manufacturing to protect so threw themselves into the development of Digital wholeheartedly.
Blink of an eye
This exhibition is focussed on the capturing of movement in photography and covers the earliest days to the present. There was one exhibit which I personally found fascinating. 'Time and Motion' showed film of process improvements in Manufacturing; before and after changes. I used to be an Estimator and Process Engineer for an electronics manufacturing plant where I was responsible for these very things. What I never did was to film the improvements in productivity. Great fun.
The use of Time Lapse and High Speed photography were used elsewhere in the exhibition to expose very different aspect of movement. Slow running of images recorded at High Speed shows motion too fast to see with the human eye, whilst Time Lapse shows fast running images of things we don't have the attention span to watch or to remember accurately. Who could watch a flower for a day and remember how each petal opened?
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