I didn't answer all of Kirk's excellent questions in my last post, so let me finish up with a few more that I haven't answered.
Why is there a resurgence of film-based photography right now?
Actually, there's also a resurgence in using older digital cameras, too. I was just going through my image archives recently for another project and kept noticing "unique" aspects that previous gear was imparting in my images. It's funny how I could almost by sight identify a Nikon D2X image out of the others. It was almost like seeing a Kodachrome slide in a raft of Fujifilm images.
I'd say there are probably two aspects to nostalgia-based photography at the moment (three if you count hardware).
The first is curiosity. Think about it. Ansel Adams is still well revered as a photographer, yet he was using film with simple hardware that's now completely outdated. Still, he managed to produce incredible work. So is there something about the old chemical world of photography that is now missing (or difficult to reproduce) in the digital one? Did the discipline you needed to do everything "right" in the film era improve the photographer in a unique way that the all-automatic digital world doesn't? If I hadn't grown up in that world, I know I'd be curious about it. I'd want to learn the things that the masters learned, in the way they learned it. And then, of course, make my own statement with that knowledge.
Secondly, there's this thing called fads. Styles come and go. New styles break out, old styles resurface. Styles do not stay constant, they are like waves, always changing, but pretty regular. In an Insta world where you're trying to stand out, you need to try things others aren't. Indeed, if your digital camera is set to all-auto and you never do anything in post, I can pretty guarantee that your images won't stand out in the doom scroll world. No swiping right for you.
Film definitely looks different than digital (despite Fujifilm's film simulations, which unfortunately aren't all that good at simulating). Of course, one slight drawback is that if today you use film, don't have a darkroom, and don't produce your own prints, you're probably doing a digital scan at some point. I remember when Galen (Rowell, one of my mentors) started switching from chemical based printing to digital printing. His images changed. Same source, it just ended up looking different (in many ways "better"). For a number of years he had a pair of prints side-by-side in his gallery: traditional and digitally-produced. That was mostly a marketing ploy, as one could argue that the digitally produced print resolved things better and had more nuanced contrast control. I always wished I had purchased one of those "film/chemical" prints, though: they do have a unique look to them.
As an aside, the only prints I have of my own work are all personally hand-created Cibachrome. The wet room process of creating them just generates a nuanced look that's different, as chemicals are used to "peel off" dyes already in the paper to reveal color. Some call this dye destruction, and I like that term because it suggests that it might create a different result than laying down color dyes on an otherwise white paper (call that dye construction).
As a bonus, there's one other thing about film that may be part of its resurgence: the element of surprise.
If you go out with even the most sophisticated film camera and take photos, you have no idea if you captured what you wanted. Not until the processing and printing is done. Moreover, some surprises can happen just in the processing and printing, like when someone puts the wrong chemicals into the machine! An over-exposed film capture looks different than an over-exposed digital capture, for instance, and it's hard to match what film does in that respect. So on top of the different style film imparts generally, there's an element for further surprise in the style that gets generated.
Why are Americans so 'home centric' in their photographic interests?
Travel solely for photographic sake can get expensive. It takes time you might not have. Generally, Americans have only a two-week vacation window and you can enjoy that more semi-locally than internationally, where you'll often use up days just getting to and from the spot.
Then there's the Wild West thing. So much of our culture has to do with discovering and opening up of the large territory we have for our more modest (comparatively) population. Combine that with 27% of our land being federally managed and having a lot of compelling landscapes to explore, and you get the traditional National Park vacation so many use as a base of much of their photography (they're too busy working to do much photography the rest of the time). 61% of Alaska, 45% of California, 63% of Utah, and 47% of Wyoming are comprised of federal land. You feel the Wild West spirit more easily when it's a long way to the nearest megacity.
This isn't to say that there haven't been great American city photographers, but there's something American about being an explorer as opposed to studying the cityscape around you more intensely. Indeed, I'd tend to say that much of the photography I see Americans pursue in cities tends to be about people's interactions (or lack thereof) in the cities, e.g. street photography. (It doesn't help that much of American architecture in big cities is basically a giant rectangle clad in glass of some sort.)
But frankly, I enjoy the corollary to this question: seeing the work of photographers from other cultures. They don't emphasize or see the same things I learned to, so I look to European and Asian photography for new inspiration for the subjects I tend to photograph.
Given that publishers are disinterested in funding new books by artists, preferring to have the artist help with both funding and marketing of books amid the skyrocketing prices for production, do you see a time when photo books by any other than proven money makers like Annie Leibovitz just die out and photo books cease to become a venue for up and coming photographers?
Well, that's a really long question that traverses several mountain ranges.
I see two aspects to the book business that come into play. First, why do you need middlemen? And second, who's going to actually sell the work?
Let's start with the latter, since it strongly has been influencing the former. Amazon completely disrupted the book business. They demand a 65% discount from the publisher to start with, and then they offer as much as 10% of that back to the link that drove someone to the Amazon page.
Just to give you an idea, I had a 10% of gross contract with my traditional book publisher in the late 90's. My books—granted, camera books, not photo books, but you'll see my point—sold for US$20. That meant that my publisher got US$7 from Amazon and I got US$0.70 from my publisher. Thing is, if the book was obtained via a link on my Web site to Amazon, I also got something like US$2 at the time from Amazon. Who do you think the more important relationship I had at the time was with, the publisher or the seller? How much do you think I was incented to drive book sales through my then nascent Web site? ;~)
Now Barnes and Noble, et.al., didn't give me bupkis. Indeed, they wanted me to show up to promote my books for free.
Things have gotten worse since then. Fortunately, my traditional book publisher went bankrupt and I started publishing my own books and keeping pretty much all the money except the credit card transaction fees. Of course, that puts all the promotion, marketing, and sales effort on me, but I long ago learned guerrilla marketing.
So the first problem in answering the question is simple: the old publishing methods that worked so well for decades are no more. At least for the niches, and photo books are pretty niche.
The other problem with photo books is cost. Historically, the way production cost was handled was to print quite a few (typically overseas) and just let the books sit permanently on bookstore shelves until they eventually sold. MBA tactics partially killed that, as bookstores started looking closer at inventory turns to build profits. Amazon's rise reduced the number of bookstores. Suddenly you can't print in volume any more to keep costs down.
Okay, it's time to tackle the last clause in the question (the actual question).
I actually have some hope that the answer is no. Why do I write that?
Right now the highest consumption of imagery is essentially via doom scrolling, and only the viral survive that. However, doom scrolling makes images highly ephemeral. As today's content creators are slowly starting to understand, they live and die by their latest post. Eventually they have a few dud posts and poof, so much for virality.
Content creators need to look at how they monetize and preserve their fame. I've already noticed that the good ones are doing this: creating bigger works that have more permanence (and often open up new revenue streams). Let me ask this: if you have a million people liking your image—okay, that's a stretch—how many of those can you convert to buyers? Early on, one of the things that the successfully viral did was use their temporary fame to get work from commercial companies, the rise of the so-called influencers.
But the money in influencing comes from commercial companies, who themselves have to keep up with the fads and styles, so holding onto that money stream as an influencer gets increasingly difficult. It's very easy to fall off the gravy train. It's also easy to become basically just part of the company's marketing team.
What content creators have to understand is that it is the content consumers that who are the most likely to provide them a long-term income stream. The so-called Gig Economy. A number of musicians learned that playing live and hawking merchandise directly made them more money than recording an album (that today no longer gets sold as an album, but broken up into little streaming pieces for which very little money returns to the artist).
So I guess my answer is this: some great photographers will figure out how to capitalize on the audience they already have. And one of those ways could be photo books offered directly (or as directly as possible). And lo and behold, flipping through pages in a photo book is exactly like doom scrolling, only slower and requires a physical thing being more directly manipulated. So all you Insta viewers, stop doom scrolling on your phone and insist that your favorite artists give you something you can set on your coffee table and use the traditional doom scroll on! ;~)
Why do you disregard Leica cameras with such prejudice?
I wouldn't call it prejudice. Technically, the answer is poorer price performance coupled with odd design choices. Do I take better pictures with my D-Lux8 than I did with my Panasonic LX100II? Nope. The Leica cost me more. It also made me learn some odd new design choices to achieve the same thing, which slows me down. Same thing happens with almost any Leica model I've ever encountered.
Does this make them bad cameras? No. But they're not the cameras that appeal to me.
Someone is going to respond with "but the Leica look." I'm not sure there is a Leica look to their DNG files (I only photograph in raw). So that leaves the lenses. Which I generally don't like. Way too expensive for the compromises they tend to impart in my images. If I'm going to use manual focus cameras and lenses, I'd prefer the tools on my Nikon cameras for focusing, say, Voigtlander lenses, which at the same focal length and aperture, I find better than any Leica lens I've tested (and less expensive).
I'm going to go back to fad and style... Some like the Leica lenses for the look they impart. It's not a look that resonates with me. It might have been 50 years ago, but I've moved on, as have most optical designs. But that's me, not the questioner. I'll note that Kirk also asked It seems so many younger practitioners are copying each other by using film Leica M cameras and 28mm lenses. Snapping semi-candid opportunities and displaying online in the same styles. Is this the death knell of street photography?
Another question! But an excellent one. No, it's not the death knell of street photography. It's the death knell of those that think that this is the way to achieve their full potential and greatness. Copying is a learning experience. Using what you learn and putting it into play with what is uniquely your vision is how you excel where others don't.
Another Galen story. On one trip with him in the Cordillera Blanca, Galen set up one of our local crew in a pose (which he kept up for well over an hour). Did I stand next to Galen and take basically the same image? No, I didn't. I was actually probably a quarter of a mile away from Galen when I took this image:
Galen's primary image from this session—which unfortunately I can no longer find on the Internet—is quite different than mine. Indeed, we were both using one of Galen's Graduated Neutral Density filters, only mine was upside down!
Copying only gets you so far. Pretty much every great photographer you would probably list for me is not someone who is copying.
Galen used to carry around reference photos with him of places he hadn't been. Some of that was because he liked to document the status of something today versus what it used to be like. Most to the time, though, he'd try to find where that reference photo was taken, then challenge whether that was the best possible place to take a photo from. He used that as a "okay, I see what the previous photographer saw, but what is it that I see?" Actually, he would have said "...that I see and feel". That latter comment is a good reason why copying doesn't work: you don't feel anything if all you're doing is copying.
You have to open yourself up to emotion as a photographer. I like to phrase it this way: a photograph is rarely about a noun (subject). It's about the adjectives, verbs, and adverbs that embellish the subject. Those come from your emotional response, not from blatant copying.
