|
April 19, 2011
Amsterdam's Foam museum is debating/exploring the future of photography with a panel of experts. Foam is for photographers, picture editors, designers and all those who have a passion for photography. The debate is online at Foam.
One of the questions is will chemical photography survive? Film and paper manufacture require factories, expensive technology and experienced technicians as well as sufficient volume production to enable it to be sold at a price enough people can afford. One commentator says:
It's a matter of economics. Chemical-based photography requires an industry to provide the raw assets for capture (film) and development (processing chemicals). This industry requires a particular scale to support the fixed costs of its infrastructure. When the available customer base no longer can support that infrastructure, the manufacturers will have some decisions to make, decisions that will be made wholly independent of its practitioners' desires.
So it looks as if analogue photography will become a niche-- a highly niche photographic process since it is no longer cheap, and it is becoming increasingly hard to find decent services for it in Australia. So we may well be are left with film fetishists & aficionados.
|
