This evening I came across this photo that I took a few years ago on the march against Brexit.
I can see it as though someone else photographed it. I am guessing that I concentrated on the couple because they looked serious and involved and together.
In The Days Of Film
It was kind of easier in the days of film to remove oneself from the event because there was always a delay between shooting and seeing a print.
If you developed and printed yourself rather than send film to a lab then the exposed film could sit around for a while.
You would also have unexposed film lying around for a while as well because film was your consumable and you didn’t want to run out.
Tamara asked me a couple of days ago how Lee Miller got hold of the film she shot when she was a war photographer.
I guess she took a couple of hundred rolls of 120 with her. Maybe she could get film along the way – after all, there was a war on and towns were being overrun.
That question answered itself when we learned at the exhibition of her work that at one point she commandeered an abandoned film shop in a town (in France, I think it was) and developed and printed her work there.
Perhaps she also stocked up on more film.
Getting Film and Keeping Film
It’s easy to say that it’s a good idea to keep unexposed film in the rolls in the canister to keep humidity out.
And it’s easy to say that one should keep the canisters upright to minimise contact between the layers on the roll. Don’t store them on their side or the layers will be resting on one another under their own weight. In warm or humid conditions the layers can stick together or chemical can migrate through contact.
But in a war zone? And what about the photographers who shot in Vietnam with sky-high humidity?
You could put a desiccant bag with the film canisters to absorb any moisture. Desiccant bags come packaged with lots of products nowadays and maybe it’s been around for while.
I just googled the question and small bags of desiccant, most commonly filled with silica gel, became widely available
for commercial and consumer use during and after World War II.
So that answers that question.
Did war photographers have the means to develop film before they sent the rolls back to the home country?
You might think that developing the film made it less subject to risk of being ruined. In a way it is true because the film has to be kept away from light. But once exposed it is no longer in little protective rolls and canisters. It can get scratched and attract dust.
I wonder, did photographers roll the developed film back in the canisters?
Even in peacetime, some photographers amass a lot of undeveloped film. Gary Winogrand would keep his exposed rolls for a couple of years before he developed them.
It wasn’t because he was lazy. It was because he wanted to remove himself mentally from the scene he had exposed. He wanted to see the photograph as though he was looking at someone else’s photographs.
Anyone who photographs knows what this means, that we see things in our own photographs and give them qualities that maybe aren’t there. At least, qualities that a disinterested eye doesn’t see.
At his death Winogrand’s refrigerator contained more than 2,500 exposed but undeveloped rolls he’d shot. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had a retrospective of Winogrand’s work including from some of the 2,500 rolls of film Winogrand never developed.
All Photographs Become Historical Records
The anti-Brexit march was in 2019. A huge, peaceful march in London that sits in the memory now as a meeting of people who saw what no one in Government wanted to see.
Now nearly seven years on we read that just a week ago or so the inner circle of the Conservative Party admit that Brexit has been a disaster.
It’s impossible to look at any event in the world and say whether it was a cause or a consequence. But looking at the world today it is not hard to say that Brexit played its part in unbalancing the world.
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