Photo-analogue.blogspot.com Website Review

Today's 127 DAY was also, inadvertently and unavoidably, a 'take your 127 camera to work' day. I shot a single roll of cut-down more photographs on my journey to work, and then the conditions turned bright and sunny - at the point in which I had no time to shoot a second roll of film. I finished the roll that I did shoot with a few of frames with long exposures in the darkroom itself, prior to Rereading Christian Metz’s ‘Photography and Fe*ish’ (1984), which can be seen as part of the ongoing ontological project of conceptualising photography in the way Metz sets out the differences between film and photography, it is striking how historically situated his readings are. Possibly, at the time Metz wrote, the respective realms of photography and cinema may have seemed settled within the short history of photography and film. This appears to have been overturned, or at least greatly complicated since: a decisive shift occurred at the end of the twentieth century with the emergence of digital imaging technologies and their distribution. I first read ‘Photography and Fe*ish’ twenty-two years ago, while researching my undergraduate dissertation on ‘Photography and the Uncanny’. Then, digital cameras did exist, but they were thousands of pounds, and it would be many years before I even held one in my hands. Electronic moving images in the form of videotape existed, but generally as a poor copy of images originating in another medium - as indeed would be any digital images that I then worked with; in its linear construction, one can think of videotape as being a physical but non-indexical medium. Having retrieved Metz's essay online earlier this year, I subsequently found the original photocopy that I had made in 1996. I was initially surprised to find it printed in a landscape format, reduced from being reprinted in a larger volume, no doubt for reasons of economy. The juvenile appearance of my own handwriting also surprised me: at the time, writing by hand was an everyday occurrence: