Newsletter - Keep it interesting, a story about an old camera...
Hello,
Yesterday a story surfaced around the internet about a guy at the impeachment hearings donning a giant old camera.
That guy is named David Burnett, and he is a photojournalist with five decades of work behind him. He's also a founding member of Contact Press Images, a photography agency he started 44 years ago with, among others, Annie Leibowitz. He's a solid photographer.
What I find the most interesting about this story is how quickly we have forgotten about film. About slowing down. About waiting for a moment. That we somehow are strange if we choose to not make thousands of exposures during a very short amount of time.
Digital photography has been around since the late 70s, although back then it was recorded onto a tape cassette in an office at Kodak, the company which weirdly enough was the first to discover digital photography and then ended up going bust because of digital photography. More on that story some other time. Photojournalists started adopting it in the late 90s, regular humans in the late 00s, and everyone when the smartphone entered in 2007.
If you go to a news conference now you will hear the clicking of shutters as if there were ten tap dancers in the room doing the jig. Gone are the days of needing to time your clicks for fear of loosing out on that special moment, changing film at 34 frames instead of 36 because you have time right then, but may not two frames later.
Enter David Burnett, photojournalist extraordinaire and large format camera enthusiast.
He has earned the right to go to the most important hearing of our time, and because of that he got to bring his toy. David Burnett knows how to make his job fun, even in the middle of serious, and that is most likely why he has had a career spanning five decades. Now we will see how he handles the pressure of all these expectations people will have upon seeing these images from the hearing.
If there is ever a mantra to my strings of words, it is this: keep it interesting. Even when it's a chore, a drag, a drab, a (insert whatever negative connotations you prefer), it still needs to be interesting. Shake it up a bit, do different, be different, and enjoy the process. Even in the middle of an impeachment hearing. That's how you get longevity.
Do you ever photograph on film? Tell me about it by hitting reply!
All for now,
Kristine