Of Old Dogs and New Tricks
by Mike Johnston
The Sunday Morning Photographer — a weekly photo.net column:
Feb 1st , 2004
When I was young, I looked with bemused tolerance on older people who resisted new
technologies and weren't interested in keeping up with current developments. And yet many
of the great enthusiasms of my youth are either dying, now, or transmogrifying
horrifyingly before my very eyes:
•The trend to small, light, efficient cars (I loved sports cars as a kid, read Car
& Driver like it was scripture, and believed, O misguided soul that I was, that
the future was bright): now dissolving in an appalling and remorseless trend towards vans
and, worse, hulking "sport ultility vehicles" which are neither sporty nor
particularly utilitarian. No sooner was the war against station wagons won than we
get...this; our roadways clotted with bastardized trucks. Honestly, not in my
wildest imaginings thirty years ago (as I soaked up Patrick Bedard in study hall) could I
have conceived of anything as tasteless and misbegotten as a Lincoln Navigator.
•Movies as art: When I was a kid, I just took it for granted that film could be an
art form. Legitimate auteurs were all over the place then, and even Hollywood movies as
often as not had artistic integrity. Little did I foresee a day when six
mega-conglomerates would control the entire media (yes, like Bond villains!) and
"movies" would devolve into a morass of cliché, mannerism, excess, formula, and
empty special effects. Just the fact that blockbuster movies are frequently based on old
television shows or comic book characters seems absolutely surreal to me, like I'm living
on the Planet of the Apes. Gee, I guess it was just entertainment after all.
Excuse me while I fly over the cuckoo's nest.
•Music listening as an activity, as an end in itself: Not only has vinyl been
relegated to the margins (in my youth I was an enthusiastic record collector, and I still
consider turntables to be among the most satisfying of toys), but the very concept of
two-channel recorded music is beginning to atomize and disintegrate, overwhelmed by big
screens, subsumed into a Babel of competing formats and various home entertainment super-
and sub-cultures. The pure form of the art is, of course, acoustic music played on a
two-channel stereo with vinyl and tubes. Now we are faced with decline on every quarter
— decline in the record industry (long since corrupted anyway); decline in the home
electronics industry; decline in two-channel listening; a decline of interest in jazz and
classical; a decline in the very quality of the music, its popularity, its importance in
the culture; even a decline — in the form of decadence — in audio as a hobby.
And, as if to add insult to injury, it turns out that rock'n'roll, which we believed in
almost like an ideology, was just a generational phenomenon, and not so important after
all. Now it's as mainstream as pro sports, and, in its own way, as quaint as ballroom
dancing. Sheesh!
One thing that troubles me about hi-fi is that decadence I mentioned. Granted, the
centrality and cultural vitality embodied in early rock-and-roll was generational, and
we're all getting older now. We have more money (some of us). We're more sedentary, more
settled. Audio equipment has evolved, and so have our stereos. But music is ageless and
will never die, and there were hi-fi fanatics before Elvis ever gyrated his pelvis; and,
although maybe it's in retrenchment mode, the sprawling recording industry in its
kaleidoscopic disarray still has pockets of vibrancy here and there.
So why is it decadent? I thinik the decadence takes two forms. First, stereos are now
all about status. In the newest issue of The Absolute Sound, the "Golden Ear
Awards" feature $20,000 preamps and $50,000 speakers. Silly. Second, when I was a
kid, a good stereo meant more people, not fewer. A stereo meant music, and music
meant rock, and rock meant a party, and a party meant friends — friends drifting
through the house, the dorm room, or the apartment, friends coming and going, friends
dancing, drinking beer, talking, passing a joint, getting off on the jams. And friends
included females. That's why you wanted a cool stereo: to impress your friends,
to provide a soundtrack for when you got lucky, and to better serve up tunes to the
gatherings of your tribe(s). Somehow, none of that is what a cool stereo means any more.
You can see it in the listening-room diagrams that sometimes grace the pages of the audio
magazines: there in the plans is the object of all the attention, drawn plain to see: a
single figure, assumed to be male, alone in a room, with his ass planted in a chair.
So how exactly did that happen?
•Cameras: In the sunny weather and clear air of my younger years, all was
simplicity, or so it seemed: there was only film, all serious photography was black &
white, and all 35mm cameras were what I now call "MMM" (a term I coined myself
that is sure not to catch on): manual, mechanical, and metal. Is there anything prettier
than a Leica M3, or more honest than a Pentax Spotmatic? (A Spottie, if you¹ve never
encountered one, is as loyal and eager as a working Collie, as pure in form as a wooden
sloop.) Even cheapo "Ph.D." cameras of the 1970s, such as the Canon Canonet,
were, in their essence, aristocrats. But this old order has been afflicted by wave after
wave of debasement. First there was the trend to point-and-shoots, which sprung up like
choking kudzu in the 1980s. Then SLRs got transformed into "Wunderplastik" (a
term coined by Bill Piece, and one that has caught on) — polycarbonate
gizmos timed with quartz and controlled by CPUs that focus themselves and buzz and whirr
and bleep and go all inert when deprived of their batteries...blobbish black things
bedecked with excrescences. And now, digital. The personal computer, which I had the
arrogance to disdain in its infancy, is, as we speak, conquering my beloved photography at
its very heart. Alas.
Roll over, Beethoven
Aging acolyte that I am, I continue to support the local resistance. I drive a sporty
car with a stick-shift (middle-aged dinosaur!), ferret through the foreign and classic
sections at the local Blockbuster where nobody else is standing, even have a darkroom in
my basement (well, okay, and one on my desktop, too, to make inkjet prints of the digicam
pictures). I still buy vinyl records, if that doesn't just put me beyond the pale.
The funny thing is, photography is actually different. It's not like MP3, which I hate,
or passenger vehicle bodies bolted to truck chasses, which I loathe, detest and despise,
or commercial Hollywood drek, which I don't exactly hate because it just makes me so very
sad that I avoid it like BLACK DEATH. I don't hate digital. I really like
digital.
Digital makes all kinds of sense. It's more fun that film. It's easier than film. It's
more controllable than film. It's more ecologically sound than film. It might require more
money, but it requires a lot less space than a darkroom does, and, let's face it, for some
people space is more precious than money. With digital it might even be easier to make
better pictures — the advantages of instant feedback are that significant.
So why, then, do I keep resisting it? I've had a few different digicams in and out of
the house, but I've resisted getting a DSLR. Actually purchasing a DSLR seems
like it will be an admission that it's what I'm going to be using for serious work.
There's nothing wrong with that, nothing threatening. It might even be something I would
really enjoy. But even so, I find myself prowling eBay looking at Minolta X cameras and
old Rolleis. It's like a voice from above is commanding, "roll over, boy!" and
I'm thinking, "huh? Roll over? We never did that when I was a puppy!"
For every man, in every age, the days of his youth were better because...well, because
he was younger then. Things seemed clearer because they were new to us and we embraced
them with open hearts. We look back now, and we idealize — flatulently, shamelessly,
with sentiment dripping all over everywhere like maple syrup over pancakes. PMA, the Photo
Marketing Association show in Las Vegas, is coming up on the 12th of this month. PMA has
become an important venue for the North American introduction of new photo products. We
expect a new Canon for photojournalists and a new Nikon to compete with the Digital Rebel,
which was the hot seller this past Christmas. I have a feeling I'm going to have
to look very hard at the new digital camera introductions that come along at PMA. Maybe I
need a D70. Maybe I need to stop haunting eBay so much. Maybe I just need to learn a new
trick once in a while.
After all, rolling over can't be that hard, can it?
—Mike Johnston
Every week, I ask people who enjoyed this column to shoot me 53 cents for it. Of
that, 32 cents goes to PayPal, and 21 cents goes to me. You've got to know I'm not getting
rich 21 cents at a time, don't you? So c'mon, contribute
53 measly cents. Where else can you get so much for your entertainment half dollar?
P.S. Oh, and about the illustration at the top of this page: it's a c.1971 Nikon F2
with unmetered finder. But the picture of it was taken with a digital camera, of course.
SMP archives
