Photography, a dying art

Amy James is an artist. It was painting that first captured her heart, the challenge of an empty canvas. But in college she discovered her true medium, putting down her paintbrush and picking up her camera. Her love affair with black and white photography has made her one of Baton Rouge’s most sought-after portrait photographers as well as a respected artist showing in galleries across the city and the state.

“There’s nothing I love more than being in the darkroom,” she says. “I love taking the film, making the proof sheets and seeing what I’ve got.”

James, who toils in traditional methods, scoffs at the digital revolution that has taken over the photography world, but the very technology she discredits could put her out of business.

Or at the very least, however, make it very expensive to stay in business, raising her costs and the cost to her clients as well.

While the cost of film remains relatively inexpensive at approximately $4 for a 36-exposure roll, darkroom chemicals like developer have nearly doubled up from $25 a gallon just a few years ago to $50 a gallon, and the selenium toner James uses to bring out the silver in her prints runs about $55 for five liters. And the paper sets her back another $100—that’s if she can find it.

Gone are the days of rolls of film and disposable cameras hanging in the check-out lines. Even the local camera stores have cleared their shelves. Southern Camera on Government Street no longer carries film or paper and has very little in the way of darkroom supplies.

“What we have in the store is all old stock,” says Lacy Baccari of Southern Camera. “We used to supply all of the LSU photography students with film and supplies, but I would say in about a year’s time that student business was completely gone. It’s been crazy, but digital seems to be the way everyone is going. We don’t even repair cameras anymore.”

Hope Reyes has worked at Kadair’s for the past three and half years and says the push to go digital started long before she got there. Kadair’s carries some black and white film, as well as color and does keep some developing supplies on hand for people who have their own darkroom, but Reyes says it’s meager compared what it was five years ago.

While James does get some of her supplies from Kadair’s she’s also had to rely on the Internet and mail-order catalogs. She recently had trouble finding medium format film anywhere in the city and had two photo shoots on a Saturday. She had to get film overnighted to her at a cost of $50, and that’s just the postage. A similar situation had her frantically calling fellow photographers in search of film and resulted in her running all over town picking up film canisters out of friend’s mailboxes. And she once had to buy 10 sheets of paper from a local photographer just to make extra prints for an upcoming gallery show.

“It’s crazy, I know,” she says. “But, this is what I do. I have to find a way to make it work.”

James asserts that color photography shot digitally has surpassed traditional film in color and richness, but digital black and whites still lack the tonal depth and brilliance of a silver print conjured up in the darkroom. Local artist Jim Zietz, a staff photographer at LSU, says it’s not that far behind, though.

Zietz, who prefers to shoot using film, began working digitally in 1992 realizing that he’d have to be fluent in both mediums to keep up with the industry.

“There are some high-resolution scanners that are getting close to matching the quality of a traditional silver print,” Zietz says. “I don’t anticipate the old methods becoming obsolete, but it will become a rarity. Perhaps then people will regard it as more of an art form.”

Tom Neff, a photography professor in the LSU School of Art, says his department teaches digital photography, but darkroom printing in both color and black and white remains the program’s primary medium.

“I am an older practitioner with 38 years under my hat,” Neff says. “I have the liberty of choosing my working methods as long as the materials are available, but for the last decade students who have not become digitally proficient will be severely disadvantaged both in commercial photographic realms and as exhibiting artists.”

James, who can’t imagine giving up her darkroom for a computer equipped with Photoshop, may be in for a rude awakening, but for now she makes it work.

“My fear is that it’s going to catch up,” she says. “People always ask me what am I going to do then. I always tell them, ‘I’ll go back to the canvas.’”