[Leica] Re: Ted Grant: Kodachrome Blues

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

WOW Ted... talk about hanging it all out for the world to see. But what you
said was, of course, exactly correct. We all have "brain farts" now and
again. I was thinking like you the first time around.

Basically, so what if my photographs don't last 100 years. But sometimes,
the greatest time, is sitting down with a big box of old pictures and
digging through them. I have a couple of boxes like that in my darkroom.
All of my photographs from Junior High, High School, College, etc.

The other day I was helping Jillian (my daughter) with something in the
darkroom and I started looking through the boxes. Every photograph I picked
up I said "see this... this is when I was... and we were doing..." Talk
about memories from heaven. These photographs ARE my life. And I have
similar boxes of pictures, negatives, and slides of when my kids were
growing up.

Photographs are priceless.

They are the history record.

They are the snapshots of time as it was.

Jim


At 07:06 PM 2/6/00 -0800, Ted Grant wrote:
>Ted Grant wrote:
><<<<Besides, in reality guys and gals, are any of the pictures we shoot
>today going to be of any "real importance" 70-100 years down the line?
>Maybe so if you're shooting the world political scene and or other world
>interest subjects.>>
>
>Pretty stupid isn't it!
>
>Gentlemen I stand corrected and humbled before you. The above comment, from
>someone who through my lectures, champions the value of our work for future
>historians, couldn't have been more off base than anything I've written in
>the past.  And, as you know, I've written a few stupid things! :)
>
>I have read your rebuttals making me realise how dumb the comments are, I
>must confess, I can't imagine what got into to me.
>
>The point is, each and everyone of us are the recorders of our times,
>whether that be our families or the world, we in fact have an unwritten
>responsibility to make sure our images last for as long as it is feasible.
>
>Here I am about to make myself look even stupider, if that's possible.
>
>Ken Wilcox writes:
>
><<<<I don't make any pretensions that my photo are great works of art, but
then
>neither are many of the very old family photos I now have.>>>>>
>
>Ken,
>Last year for my Leica seminar one of the presentations was "The Family
>Album" and it's value to the ongoing family. Yep you guessed it! We used
>colour slide copies of age old sepia prints during the opening and closing
>with E6 & Kodachromes of our families of yesterday and grandchildren of
>today.
>
>Some of the old prints we copied must have been well on the way to 100
>years old, even some of the old fart here as a baby and I'm now ready for
>71!
>
>Marc James Small writes:
>
><<<And family members will care, deeply, about even the most simple of happy
>snaps, while ethnologists love nothing better than finding a trove of
>local-color pictures from a century back.>>>>
>
>Marc,
>As usual, you're right! I can attest how much fun we had going through the
>old family albums looking for the photos in the lecture.
>
>The archivists I know from the National Archives of Canada, where an
>extensive file of my negatives, slides and prints are stored, gave me a
>tour of their recently opened storage vaults containing the National Photo
>Collection of Canada.
>
>To see this awesome historical collection which includes the complete works
>of Yousuf Karsh and many other famous and not so famous Canadian
>photographers, instilled in me a  greater meaning for the value of what we
>take pictures of, no matter what the subject, as each and everyone of them
>is a record of the times.
>
>And George Pyle who wrote:
>
><<<<and I, too, seriously doubt that anything I shoot today will be of any
>interest to anyone outside of my immediate family even if I did shoot it
>with a Leica.>>>>>
>
>George,
>The interesting thing from an archivist point of view is, the simplest of
>photography can be far more revealing of a society than that of the "big
>name" photographer who specialises is one subject.
>
><<<< I've used Kodachrome for nearly 40 years as my father, who also used a
>>Leica, did before me.  He is nearly 90 years old and has left me with

>>moments in time from his and my mother's life and from my own childhood
that
>>still shine forth beautifully from old Kodachrome slides.>>>>>
>
>Apropos the above:
>
>When a couple of my grandsons, cousins, were young boys maybe 4 or 5, they
>had a squabble over some toys. As usual grandpa was doing the happy snap
>routine. (on Kodachrome.) :) and captured the face making, a bit of shoving
>and crying.
>
>Last year, now ten years after the "rumble," I showed the two of them the
>"Family Album" slide presentation to which the younger of the two who "lost
>the toy battle" came out with.."Now I've got evidence on film I'm going to
>get even, not mad.":)
>
>Anyway gentlemen you must really wonder what the hell I was thinking on the
>original post.
>
>Humbled and humiliated. I trust I've exonorated myself. Will I quickly
>return to  Kodachrome again?  Can't honestly commit to it despite all I've
>said. :)
>
>ted
>
>Ted Grant
>This is Our Work. The Legacy of Sir William Osler.
>http://www.islandnet.com/~tedgrant
>