I Can See it For You Wholesale

I like film. In fact, I love film. And lately, I shoot more film than digital. But it seems like a lot of folks are investing film with an absurd mystical machismo, as though by shooting film you can reclaim your freaking manhood, or something.

It’s not a vision quest, it’s not a magic wand. It’s just a tool. Just use it.

Here’s an example — not even a prime offender, just something that popped up in my google reader:

THE ZEN OF FILM vs. DIGITAL GRATIFICATION « doug menuez 2.0: go fast, don’t crash

BTW: I’m not opposed to mysticism in photography; I’m a Minor White fan, after all. But the mysticism belongs to the relationship between the photographer and the subject and the viewer — not the damn gear.

Interesting. There’s a guy in my area who goes around spraypainting over graffiti with silver paint, taking down postings and stickers, etc. I see a lot of his handiwork, and I’ve seen him in action a couple times.

The image is a particularly odd example — the graffiti was obscured by leaves, barely visible from the sidewalk; the silver paint calls far more attention to it than would have been given otherwise, not to mention the collateral damage to the shrubbery.

Anyway, I found out a little more about the fellow from this blog post, which I found via my flickr stats referrers log, since they used one of my other CC-licensed images:

It’s an odd sort of culture war. I don’t really have a stake in it — I seldom notice graffiti unless it’s unusually good, unusually interesting in its placement, or particularly atrocious; the vast majority of it falls well below the threshold, like most of the text that surrounds us city-dwellers.

It is an interesting story, though, and I’m glad to know a bit more about it.