News from Kodak/Chapter 11 Emergence

[Keith]

Sure, once Ilford comes out with a nice color neg film I'll support them. 🙄

I think we need to face the fact that colour has become the realm of digital Jamie and colour film will probably fall by the wayside sooner or later. Black and white film has a definite superiority over digital to my eyes and I don't think digital can actually replace it now or in the near future.

And nothing I've seen from the Leica Monochrom makes me think otherwise!

 

[Jamie123]

I think we need to face the fact that colour has become the realm of digital Jamie and colour film will probably fall by the wayside sooner or later. Black and white film has a definite superiority over digital to my eyes and I don't think digital can actually replace it now or in the near future.

And nothing I've seen from the Leica Monochrom makes me think otherwise!

That's an old tale that just doesn't ring true. To my eye digital bw looks much better than digital color. BW film doesn't have any more of a superiority over digital than color neg film does at least not in regards to aesthetic qualities. The simple reason why bw film might last longer is that it is easier to produce and there are a lot more niche companies making bw film than color.

 

[sevo]

The simple reason why bw film might last longer is that it is easier to produce and there are a lot more niche companies making bw film than color.

YMMV as to whether it is easier to produce, but it is cheaper to make on a small scale - a colour casting has a much higher start-up cost and minimum volume, as it has thrice the number of critical layers.

Black and white does not need downsizing, it already is produced on art supply scale, having undergone the shrinking procedure decades ago - high volume black and white went away in the consumer market when it became more expensive than CN over the Hunt silver speculation in 1980, and vanished into an artistic niche when the dailies took to printing colour some five to ten years later.

But apart from all economic aspects, there are conceptual differences that do matter in the world of art. Black and white is a immediate physical action, light exposing silver, while colour, with its three filtered layers, couplers and bleaches is inherently mediated, an artefact of a man made process rather than of nature - evident in that we could assign very different filters or colours by a mere act of definition of the colour process. As such, black and white is on quite a different side of the (philosophical) fence than colour or digital.

 

[Jamie123]

But apart from all economic aspects, there are conceptual differences that do matter in the world of art. Black and white is a immediate physical action, light exposing silver, while colour, with its three filtered layers, couplers and bleaches is inherently mediated, an artefact of a man made process rather than of nature - evident in that we could assign very different filters or colours by a mere act of definition of the colour process. As such, black and white is on quite a different side of the (philosophical) fence than colour or digital.

Black and white is every bit as much of a 'man made process' as color film. It's just less complicated of a process. And I'd be very wary of philosophical distinctions based on differences in the way the chemical process works. In the real world (and in the art world) nobody cares about those differences simply because very few are even aware of them. What matters much more is the way people treat these different media and how that affects their perception of how an image comes to be. As such color film is definitely on the same side of the fence as bw.

 

[John Bragg]

Sure, once Ilford comes out with a nice color neg film I'll support them. 🙄

I see your point but I shoot mono so my priorities are different.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Awesome, very awesome.

To celebrate, I think I'll shoot a few Tri-X rolls...

 

[sevo]

In the real world (and in the art world) nobody cares about those differences simply because very few are even aware of them.

No doubt about the real world. In the art world, these distinctions do matter, though.

 

[Jamie123]

In the art world, these distinctions do matter, though.

The distinction between film and digital certainly matters. The distinction between color and monochrome certainly matters. However, the differences in the chemical process between color and monochrome does not matter on a conceptual level. On a practical level, sure, but not on a conceptual one.