 This thing that I hold in my hand is going to kill photography. It is going to destroy the art form. It is going to take photography from the realm of the artisan and the people who care about it and they care about image making and it's going to put it into the hands of the general public and all they need to do is just press a button and then it just takes a photograph. It is really the death of photography. Those are not necessarily the words of somebody speaking in 2020, but they could have been the words of somebody in 1888 who had been a dedicated photographer who was appalled at this new camera, the Kodak number one, which was a seismic event in the very truest sense of the word in the history of photography because it took photography from the hands of the gentleman, scientist of the person who was hiding underneath the dark cloth behind that big lens, all that mystery chemicals and it put it into the willing arms of the general public and oh, geez, did that public picked up that ball and run with it? Yes, you know, photography exploded. The popularity of photography exploded. Photography all of a sudden broke free of the tripod. It broke free of the restraints that had been built up since the inventions of the the garotype. People were experimenting and taking photography in all of those directions that they've never even considered before. Kodak, of course, were extremely happy with this turn of events because they had seen a gap in the market. They had seen an ability to shake up the way that things had been done. And they have been proven right. Throughout the 20th century, Kodak had a lot of input in the growth of photography. And in 1975, they also developed the very first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, you know, weighed four kilograms. It would have cost you $10,000 in 1975 money if you could have bought one. And you would have thought, hey, well, Kodak would be quite keen on on this. But they weren't they were just like, no, do you know what? Actually, we sell film. We don't want to create something that stops people buying films. So thank you, but let's put it to one side. Kodak was intent on building up this monolithic company that was basically photography with the capital P. I believe that they saw themselves as photography. And in certain circles, people saw photography as Kodak. The two were synonymous with each other. But that ball that they had started rolling in 1975 and wanted to ignore it. But I think it's going to it was it was gathering speed. It was gathering momentum. And it was rolling inextricably towards the foundation of that Kodak monolith. There have always been arguments in photography and and and today is no exception. There is a feeling amongst certain photographers, right, that film has always been better, will always be better. And those who photographed in the film days are somehow inherently better photographers, and that is a misconception. I am big enough and ugly enough to hold my hand up and say, do you know what? I'm actually wrong. I am wrong to think that way. In 1988, I was just a teenager and like teenagers, I was absolutely committed, committed 100 percent to the music that I liked. Anything else that did not fall into that very narrow category, it has to be said, of music was just rubbish, that it was of no consequence to me whatsoever. My parents didn't like it, and I thought their music was just junk, right? So this is what was happening is that I was learning photography. I was learning to see the world through the eyes of the of the older masters, whose story had already been written. They had taken up a camera. They had lived their life with the camera and they had retired or they had passed away. And now people were talking about their photography. And these are the photographers who I was being exposed to. And they are the ones who even now, much like the music that I listened to, have the most connections with them. They move, they have the most impact emotionally on me, because that's what I listened to in my formative years. And there's always going to be that in my mind. And I'm happy to hold on to that. But it has been an issue with with embracing digital. Digital photography was first introduced to me or digital imaging rather when I was a student and there was Photoshop version two, I think it was. Now, this is before layers were even a thing. Right. I don't know if you like hands up. Like like no layers in Photoshop whatsoever. And and it was great. I was like, wow, this is so cool. This is so cool because we can do things and I can use this to fix. And that was the operative word is to fix things that were mistakes that I found difficult to fix in the traditional dark room. It was very hard for me to do that. So Photoshop was a boon. And that is why where the seeds of what are my issues with digital now was so is because I saw it and I interpreted it from a film point of view. I didn't see the digital landscape as a means of expression or a means of somewhere to explore. I simply saw it as a tool to fix things. I wasn't aware of it at the time. But of course, I was living through that seismic change that somebody like LaTig had had when they were in the end of the 19th century and given cameras that they could be free and flexible with taking pictures in the bath. You know, try doing that with a large format wet plate camera. You know, sort of thing. So all of these things were not in my consciousness because I was in this kind of weird position between digital and film. I had a foot in both camps and I wasn't quite sure which one to go with. All the people, all the mentors, all the people to whom I looked up to, were firmly rooted in the filmic world. And the people in the digital world, certainly since the advent of digital cameras in the early 2000s, they were. For the most part, finding their feet. They were they were taking kind of rubbishy pictures, we could say. And, you know, and I don't think that's being completely unfair. But having said that, it's not like people with film cameras never take rubbish pictures. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of rubbish produced on both sides. But it's unlike it's not. I'm surprised that there was a lot of odd imagery taken in the digital world, certainly in the early days of digital, because it's a new medium as people are experimenting with something just as much as, you know, when punk rock came along and shook up modern music and it took all those people like, you know, Genesis and Yes, who were doing that prog rock, Stray Kids, I am, you know, I'm a grown up musician now. And it said to them, no, right, we don't need all that stuff. We've got three chords and boom and a holy t-shirt and we're going to go with it. And they started a movement. Now, some punk is a little bit rough around the edges and it's it's it's it's an uncultured music, of course, because it's supposed to be uncultured. But later on, the things that leapt from punk, all the genres that stemmed from that moment have found their voice, have found their place. And that's what's going on with digital photography now is that the people who are practicing digital imaging, I think that's probably a better word, digital imaging are starting to find their feet. They are starting to see the infinite possibilities in digital because they're not bound by constrictions of history. They don't feel a burden of expectation. They are quite happy to take their influences from the old masters and things of the nature because they can because they can manipulate the images. And they're quite fine with doing so in a way that echoes those masters, the people who are kind of married to film photography cannot do. Both mediums have fortes and strengths and and drawbacks. But film has a somewhat limited repertoire in terms of emulating other things, whereas digital doesn't. So if somebody wants to emulate old masters, then then do so. If somebody wants to take the technology that is now available to them, because obviously digital photography isn't just about senses and things of that nature, it's about the thing, other things that we could do. Small cameras, big cameras, cameras that fly. I mean, for God's sake, cameras that fly that you can just do that. Oh, geez, that again is like, wow. So you can see this change of pace has been so quick that even in my lifetime, there is so much has happened. There is no wonder that there are older photographers and photographers of my generation who are just going, I really find this change of pace difficult to keep up with. So when I talk to a photographer in their 20s and they're all about Instagram and all these sort of things, and I know Instagram is a whole another debate and the idea of liking and shares and things like that. It's a whole separate thing. But they are comfortable using these tools. They are comfortable expressing themselves in these ways. And I think that is fantastic. I think that is wonderful. And it's that enthusiasm for creation that we all felt when we were younger, when we were in our 20s and 30s and we were we were we were committed wholly to this idea that this was the best thing ever. That that's that's great because we need people like that to shake up the status quo to remind us that this hat that some of us wear about the old ways were the best ways and the only ways is a complete fantasy and has always been a fallacy. Photography has always been in a state of change, a state of flux of movement. Look at pictorialism versus pure photography. Pictorialism is about messing with the photographs and things, essentially digital processing versus photography where no, no, that's all wrong. You shouldn't do any manipulation kind of things. And that argument is still going today. You have the ideas of like, well, I'm not going to dabble in new technologies or I'm not going to explore new technologies because I've always done things this way and this way is the best. Look at somebody like Walker Evans. Walker Evans, hugely famous for all of his work on the FSA and doing the stuff that, you know, that was was kind of showing America itself through the depression. He was gifted a Polaroid SX-70 camera and as much film as he ever could photograph. And he took digital, he didn't say not digital. He took instant photographs. I can't think of anything that's more at odds with the idea of a photographer from the 1920s than instant photography in color. I was surprised. I had no idea he had ever done this and the photography that he created from these is wholly unlike anything that he did with the FSA. Of course, technology means that you and I can have this conversation no matter where or when you are in the world and it's great to have you here. If you'd like to help other people discover the channel, please hit the subscribe button below because that way YouTube takes the sign that you like this kind of content and it will help surface this to other people who share similar ideas. In 2012, those balls finally caught up with Kodak and they were forced to file bankruptcy because they hadn't decided to embrace the change. They hadn't decided to move with the times and to realize that photography wasn't just one set thing that they said it was. Even as late as 2007, Kodak were making adverts saying that they weren't interested in digital effectively, that film was always going to be around and that is a great example of why it's fine to want to hold on to the past and to celebrate the things that we enjoy. I want to listen to the music that I listened to when I was a teenager. I like to, you know, wallow in my nostalgia. I like to think of the happy old days of being in the dark room with the stop bath and the fixer and all that sort of stuff. But I'm also aware that those days are slipping inexorably into the past. They are going away and that it doesn't change what I do. It doesn't change how I take photographs. It doesn't change the way I feel about photography. I am excited to see the images that the new generations of photographers are creating because they are wholly unlike the things that have gone before us. They are as different to the photography of the 1990s and the 2000s as the photography of Man Ray and all the stuff that was going on in the 1920s was from the 1880s. It was an exciting time. And that's the people taking a technology that was new and running with it and exploring it, the idea that somebody like Eugene Ager, who spent his entire career essentially photographing with the same camera, big boxing on the streets of Paris and that that's somehow noble and great. Where has this come from? Where is this idea taken root that to be in the to be welded in the past is a good thing? We need to move forward. Photographers of my generation, I'm not suggesting that we drop everything and embrace digital because, of course, most of us do, we most of us use digital cameras. What I am suggesting is that from both sides, we see and appreciate that we see photography from different lenses, from different sides, and that ultimately, so long as you are having fun, so long as you are enjoying the process, it does not matter how you get from the idea of her up here into whatever medium that you want to put it on. I like to read books. I like to see prints, right? You may enjoy looking at photographs on a phone. That's cool, man, whatever floats your butt, whatever you want to do, do it. Let's stop arguing with each other. Let's stop being clicky. The history of photography is littered with people arguing against one another, trying to say that their way is right and their way is better. And it's not. It's all great photography. Everything is wonderful. There's photography is just how we see the world. There are as many different ways of photography as there are people with a camera and a camera is just a tool. It doesn't matter what it is that happens to record light on some sort of sensitive format that you can then look at later on. It is just a thing. Stop worrying about it, man. Just just go out. Have fun. Just go nuts. Stop worrying about, you know, whether something's better than not. You know, it's there isn't a winner in this argument. The only person who's going to win is that you become so obsessed with moaning at the other person and trying to convince them that you are right. That you don't spend that time and that effort and that energy taking photographs. The Kodak number one changed photography completely, not because it was put into the hands of the original photographers, the open beta, if you will, but it was put into the hands of people who just used it for fun without concerning themselves with the with the greater ideas about photography. And that, of course, in turn led to the change in the very way that most people think about photography. And now we've kind of reached photography 2.0 with the advent of digital and all of that that entails and it's up to this newer generation, this generation who have only known digital, who who don't consider themselves to be photographers, but image creators and the camera is just a tool. So so this digital world that we live in has killed photography just as much as the Kodak number one killed photography before. And what photography was priced at change and it will change again in the definition of photography will change, but it doesn't change the fact that within us all throughout the generations of people who have looked upon the world and go, I have a capacity to fix what I see in some sort of form to share with others. That is what draws all of us throughout the years throughout the generations throughout the centuries to this this human instinct to create a mark on the world to say, this is this is what I see. Kodak didn't want to admit that. They thought that it would just be the same always and that their way of seeing the world would never change. Much like this this grain silo in Cape Town was a large concrete industrial thing. And for years, people only saw it as an eyesore and something that blotted the landscape and it took a new way of seeing a new way of interpreting existing things to create this lavishly complex, bizarre, artistic, wonderful expression of architecture from an existing block of resolute unchangingness. This is the joy of what's happening in photography today. People are changing it in front of our very eyes. And I wish that I had the use and that Vim and that Viga to go with them. But I would encourage you absolutely to not say to these people, try and force them into the old ways of doing things, encourage everybody to explore the sheer joy of taking photographs. A photographer who kept evolving with the times is Edward Steichen. I would suggest you go and check his video right here. I know that you will enjoy it. Thanks for watching.