Film
In the beginning, there was film...
In the beginning, there was film, that plastic strip coated with a chemical emulsion. It captures what you see with the camera. I have a long history with film - thirty years and thousands of rolls of history. I have shot mainly digital for the past 20 years, but I keep my old Nikon F3 around and shoot a roll of film once in a while.
I would like to think it keeps me honest, but honesty probably has nothing to do with it. It simply reminds me of the days when you needed to be patient. Back before this century, you shot some film - 24 or 36 exposures to a roll. Then you would wind the film back on the spool, pop it out of the camera, put it in the plastic container and send it to a photo lab. Then you would have to wait.
After an hour, a day or a week, maybe more, you would get the negatives back, along with the prints - the tangible paper - glossy or matte, borders or no borders, and you witnessed what moments you had captured. It always felt like a small celebration. When I picked up the prints after a long trip, I got to relive the journey.
My dad had an old Argus camera, a metal brick with manual controls. Back then, the 35 millimeter film came in tiny aluminum cans with screw-top caps. He shot slides and was frugal with his film. Every few months, we would all get together in the living room. He would set up the projector, dim the lights, and we would watch as he projected the slides onto a portable screen that he set up in the living room. It was a communal experience. I still have his slides and have scanned them all.
My mom got a Kodak Instamatic at some point in the 1960s. It took size 126 film cartridges, eliminating the hassle of threading the film through the camera and onto a takeup spool. She popped in the cartridge and snapped 24 photos, then pried it out and sent it off to be developed.
If she shot indoors, she would put a flash cube onto the camera and fire away. She got four flashes per cube, and it would rotate automatically after each shot. I still have those photos.
My first camera was a Kodak Brownie that took 127 roll film. I was 6 years old and it was a hand-me-down. I don’t know if it was my mom’s or my brother’s, but I liked to load the film and shoot with it. Nothing to adjust, just click the shutter and take the shot.
There’s a photo of me with that camera around my neck - loaded with film - and a cigarette that somebody must have stuck in my mouth. Maybe it was a chewing gum cigarette. They were big at the time, gum cigarettes for kids.
By the time I was 10, I had put a darkroom together in the crawlspace of our house. I built it with old bricks that I found down there. The local photo store sold chemicals and paper. I got some trays and a thermometer, along with a red light bulb, and I was in business. I developed Kodak Plus-X Pan film and made contact prints with an old piece of window glass.
After a few years, My dad bought me a Bogen enlarger and gave me his Argus. My first good camera was an Olympus OM-1, and I must have been a teenager when I got it. So, what does this all mean? Not much, except that I have been taking photographs for a long time, way before I ever thought of myself as a photographer. It was just fun to do.
I pawned the Olympus in the mid 1980s during some desperate times. It had a roll of exposed film inside of it and I never got it back. I got my life together, but took a long break from shooting photos. It’s too bad, because I was doing interesting work at the time, driving a truck around New York City. I had access to strange and hidden places and could have photographed it all. Sadly, I did not.
The only images from that time are in my head and maybe that’s a good thing. Not everything is meant to be recorded. Everybody shoots everything now, but that rant is for another day. As the 1990s got into gear, I began to take road trips and bought a little camera to record stuff with - touristy stuff, but stuff, nonetheless. That was good for a while, until I wanted to get better shots. I bought a beat-up Olympus OM-2n and some old third-party lenses and began to come back from my road trips with rolls of film to be developed. I lived for the next road trip.
Digital cameras came along and I happily embraced them. The massive battles online - and all online battles are basically meaningless - over “film vs digital” were resolved very quickly, much more quickly than any of the combatants could have imagined. Now almost everyone shoots digital, aside from the diehards and nostalgia buffs, and nobody argues about that stuff anymore. I don’t harbor any sentimentality for film. No more than I miss the vinyl records I sold in the 1980s. As long as I can record what I see and listen to what I want to hear, it’s just technology to me. The following photos, though, were shot on film.
1.
I shot this in Florida, in 1990, on what began as a road trip to Washington, D.C. I had been driving a pastry truck for a year and not taken a vacation. When I finally managed to get a week off and combine it with the two weekends on either side of it, my then-wife and I decided to drive to D.C. and look around. You would think I might have flown or taken the train after driving every day for a living, but I like to drive. I borrowed my dad’s car and we headed to Washington, D.C. on Interstate 95.
When we got there, the government went on strike. I should have been reading the news more carefully and this was before the internet, so we were not saturated with alarms and alerts the way we are now. We thought it would be a good idea to go to Virginia Beach. I was so cluelesss about anything outside of New York City. I thought Virginia Beach would be a three-block long beach town. I had a mental image of some small motels with doors that opened onto the sand and maybe a 7-11 in the middle of this short strip. We were not prepared for the actual Virginia Beach.
I consulted the road atlas and we pointed that old navy blue Ford Taurus south, towards Myrtle Beach. The Myrtle Beach of my mind had a pier with fishing boats, sleepy dead-end streets, a sidewalk of small grocery stores and an old-fashioned hardware store, maybe with overhangs and stairs to sit on while the occasional car rolled by. This was based on a lifetime of fantasy, lots of books, and strange images of Cape Cod towns that were embedded in my head as a child. The actual town of Myrtle Beach was nothing like this. I don’t remember if we stayed the night or fled immediately. I believe we moved on quickly.
We ended up in Florida for a few days. I thought Orlando would be cool. I thought Orlando was on the ocean. Isn’t everything in Florida on the ocean? I wanted to see an old aviation museum and we even met some friends from New York City who were visiting the town. We drove around Florida and I was happy to drive. In fact, that was my main joy down there.
At some point, I snapped this photo. When the film came back from processing, something clicked. I liked it. The photo showed what I had felt when I shot it. It was not just another snapshot. I lost track of it for a long time, but found an envelope with the print in it years later.
2.
Possibly the town of Havre, possibly not. This is old U.S. Route 2, the “High Line.” I went up there so that I could drive it all the way to the coast.
If I had shot this on digital, I might have taken more photos, I might have had much longer lenses with me, and I might have gotten some close-ups on the “CHEVROLET” sign, along with the row of windows below it. I wish I had shot a close-up of the window by the door with the stuff pasted all over it. I was shooting on valuable film, though, and took this one photo.
I had few lenses on that trip. I was with my friend Peggy and we each had a photo bag on the passenger seat floorboard. Rolls of film were scattered around the car, along with all kinds of other crap. I had unbolted and removed the rear bench from the Wagoneer. By the time we were four days out, the rear of that old Jeep was a sea of gear, bags, food, duffels, camping equipment, and gallons of water in cloudy old plastic jugs.
When we needed something, we would turn around and stick our hands into the mess and try to pull out what we wanted. Eventually, we emptied the whole car and repacked it in a Utah parking lot.
3.
I was racing to use up my last rolls of Kodachrome before Dwayne’s Photo Lab in Kansas City stopped the final chemical line in the world that could develop it. Kodachrome was my favorite film. It was also complex to process. Kodachrome colors have their own special look and they never fade, unlike many other color emulsions.
You had to get your last rolls in to Dwayne’s by noon on December 30th, 2010 or there was no place else on the planet where you could ever get it developed again. Kodak had already stopped manufacturing the chemicals.It was all sad and it felt a bit tragic. People gathered together in forums online and commiserated with each other. Some wept. We all frantically shot our last rolls and sent them off to Kansas City.
I miss Kodachrome. It took more effort to shoot film and it took more money and it took more time. Does all that equate to virtue or better photos? No, but it’s still different. You can try to replicate real film all you want with digital tools, but it’s not the same. It’s not like holding a slide up to the light to stare at the piece of film that actually captured the photo.
4.
My first telephoto lens. By this time, I had a better idea of what I was doing. I began to see things differently. It was not a conscious learning process. I was stuck in traffic when I shot this and the film was pretty slow, but there was enough light. I forget what the building looked like.
5.
This was Grumpy’s Texaco before it changed signs and became Grumpy’s Shell. Actually, “Grumpy” is nowhere to be found on any of the signage, but that’s what it was called by the people of Gerlach. If you got stuck on the playa after a rain, Grumpy was the guy you most and least wanted to see, driving out to get you in his tow truck.
I had a low-level vendetta with him for five years. He was unaware of this. It began when I pulled in for gas one day and asked a question about something. As with most good vendettas, I have long-since forgotten what the question was or what the response was, but he said something offhanded and I took offense.
Unfortunately, he ran the only gas station in town. There was a station in Empire, only 7 miles away, and I would top off there every time I went to Gerlach for the next five years. I would drive right by Grumpy’s with a grim smile. I eventually broke down and got gas from him again one day. Perhaps Empire was closed. I don’t remember. Either way, he was pleasant and I let bygones be bygones. He was oblivious to my insanity. I took this photo while staying at Bruno’s Motel that night.
6.
I took this photo and vaguely remember its location– less than an hour east of Barstow, but I could be wrong. I have been unable to find it again for 20 years. It could have tumbled into the desert, turned to dust, and that’s the end of the story. It happens.
I am probably not looking hard enough. Can you imagine what that mug must have looked like with all the lights lit up? I wonder if they blinked at all. I wonder what the menu was like. I wonder where that sign is now.
When I hold up this negative, I am holding an object that was present when I took the photo. That’s more than you can say about a digital photo. Does it mean anything? I don’t know.
I don’t know much. I am a romantic, but I don’t miss the hassle of film. I don’t miss having to be frugal with my shots. I don’t miss having to wait to see whether or not I nailed the exposure. I don’t miss the expense.
I do like the way film looks, but that may be an acquired taste and, the more that time passes, the less that means. Then again, I don’t know.
7.
I think this place is gone. I did not see it the last time I passed through Arco, in 2010 or 2011. I’m grateful I blew a frame of Kodak Royal Gold 100 on it back in the 20th century.
Arco was the first town to be lit by a nuclear power plant. It was a “dawn of the Atomic Age” kind of thing, back in the late 1940s. The film projectors in this place ran on juice that came from the little reactor up the road. They are still proud of their atomic heritage up in Arco.
I was on my way home from another glorious hot springs trip. I had a plastic bag on the floor of the car with 15 or 20 rolls of exposed film in it. I stayed in a motel in Arco that night, one of those places with cinderblock walls and a parking space in front of the door.
I ate at a joint called “Pickles Place” and I got some fried pickles. I don’t remember how well they sat with me, but I would love to go back again. There was also an ominous sign by a bridge over the Big Lost River. It said “This Is Our Legacy” and the riverbed was dry.
All photos by Paul Vlachos.
This piece appeared in EXIT CULTURE: WORDS AND PHOTOS FROM THE OPEN ROAD. You can purchase the book on Amazon HERE.
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Gerlach: Those gizmos frame left appear to be actual phone booths or extraterrestrial worm hole transports. Either way: To hell with cell phones!
what a wonderful trip down memory lane. I remember those early cameras, too. I took a summer intensive at Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula when I first moved to Montana in the 90's. loved working in the dark room, even built one in our house in Lakeside - never developed a damn thing in it. when we sold the house I tried to sell the never used developer - by that time all was digital. ended up donating to the college. hope some romantic for old school photography has gotten some use from it.