Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
My name is Leif Norman,
and I make all of my money with this finger and this eye.
What do I do?
Oh, I thought someone was going to say proctologist.
(Laughter)
Yes, I'm a photographer.
Here I am on an adventure in Iceland -
I shoot festivals and contemporary dance and architecture and stuff,
but I will not shoot your wedding.
(Laughter)
So, where is photography at now? Where is it going?
We've seen an enormous change in lens-based electronics over the past -
well, this eight-year period here,
this is Saint Peter's Square.
This is the choosing, the magicking up, of either Pope,
Francis and Saint Benedict -
Saint Benedict? Benedict. He's not a saint yet.
And you can see a big difference here -
everyone's got an iPad eight years later,
and there's one phone in 2005.
So, how is a photographer supposed to differentiate themselves among this crowd,
where everyone has a lens?
What is the future of photography?
I think to understand the future and the present of any technology,
one must look back.
If I was just to do this and say, "Okay. I'm going to teach you chemistry.
Memorize that.
Now you know chemistry. Done."
That's awful; that's rotten.
What we have to do is go back to Aristotle and say,
"They thought fire and water and all this stuff were elements,
and we have to go through wrong, wrong, wrong, mistake, fail,
incorrect, slightly more correct, slightly more correct,
and then we get to an actual science today:
you add a proton, take a proton away,
you've got mercury, you got gold -
fascinating - silver.
So photography is best understood, I think,
by going way back to the beginning, to this guy, Fox Talbot, born in 1800.
He was a rich, southern, English gentlemen -
very smart guy - he was a mathematician.
He had leisure; he had leisure, smarts and money.
So he was in Italy one fine summer,
trying to sketch this lake landscape
with this device called a camera obscura.
You put paper on top of the little diagram there
and you trace it all out,
the lens focuses on what you're looking at,
and then he took the paper away,
and it was garbage.
It was just squiggles; it didn't come out at all.
And he thought, "Why can't I just get this dumb machine to do it for me?"
I just want the photons to draw themselves;
I want nature to do it for me."
He knew about this stuff called silver nitrate.
In fact, the alchemists knew about silver nitrate;
they called it lunar caustic.
So, the moon is associated with silver.
It should have been associated with the sun;
they should have called it solar caustic because this stuff,
even though it looks like sugar and salt, it's kind of magical.
You dissolve it in water, and then you put that solution on things,
and when that solution dries and gets exposed to light,
it turns dark.
So he started playing around with this stuff,
and he put it on some paper,
and he put that in a modified camera,
a camera obscura, right?
It means room. I think it was up on that slide.
And it took forever, took two hours or so, to get an image.
He was burning the image right in the camera;
he kept opening it, looking in there,
and then, finally, he got this image,
but it would fade after a while - once it continued to hit the light,
it would fade away and you'd get nothing.
So that was a problem.
Then he discovered this stuff called sodium thiosulfate -
more pretty crystals.
I love chemistry.
And this is the fix.
So, you pull the image out of the camera,
and you got the image, and quickly wash it with the stuff,
voilà, it will stay there;
you can expose it to light and it won't get ruined.
But then he discovered another thing, called the latent image effect.
He didn't have to leave it in the camera for two hours -
he could leave it in there for two minutes
and then take it into a darkroom
and put that developer-type stuff on it -
which was a secret back then, I don't know what it was -
and you would get an image right away; it was hiding there the whole time.
It didn't look like anything happened in the camera,
but then you take it in the darkroom and voilà.
This must have been like alchemy;
this must have been just magical at this time - this is 1839.
And this is a positive print that Fox Talbot made in 1843 -
so, they're quite beautiful.
They have this old-worldy look to them.
The calotype is the negative part -
kalos from beautiful -
and the positive part -
what you do -
let me just put this here for a second -
this is your negative;
it's all black and white and everything's reversed,
left and right is reversed.
And you put this on top of another piece of paper
that's coated with silver nitrate
and you expose the back to some light, sunlight,
and you peel it apart - oh, a little bit more -
then you peel it apart, and you fix it, and you have a positive.
You can make hundreds and hundreds of these.
And to this day, this is still how photography works.
So, once again just to show you,
it just reverses around like that - quite pretty.
The sepia - and the positives are called salt prints,
so calotypes are the negatives and salt prints are the positives.
The sepia color is quite otherworldly and very nice too,
and it's from cuttlefish,
like the cuttlefish we saw in the video earlier today.
It's sepia: the color of the ink that comes out of this fish,
and that's why sepia photographs are called sepia photographs.
And like I said, modern film still works this way.
Go to Don's Film and get some black and white film,
and you get the negative, and you can make infinite positives from it.
So, early photography was quite complicated:
you needed lots of equipment, lots of knowledge;
you probably made lots of mistakes.
You had to be like an alchemist just to get an image.
But let's run through what I would say are the greatest hits
of 20th century photographic technology.
It starts off with Kodak in 1888.
He said we're not going to have the public being educated at all,
we'll give them a camera:
"You push the button, and we do the rest." That was his motto.
These cameras shot circular images,
and there were 100 photos in that one camera.
You had to send it back to the factory to get it reloaded,
but, ah, what the heck?
You didn't even have to focus it, just pointed it, pulled the trigger,
voilà, wind it a little forward.
So now anyone could be a photographer.
In the early 1900s,
these little guys are basically magnesium bombs -
that looks like its a fuse on there?
It is a fuse on there.
You'd light the thing, you'd run over to your camera,
it would go woosh like that,
it'd give off light and smoke -
I guess you'd do it indoors? I don't know - they're crazy.
In the 1930s, Kodachrome, color film, became popular,
and also that camera there is a very early 35mm prototype,
and we still have the 35mm size
in modern, full-frame digital cameras.
And then Poloraid introduced in the 1940s the idea of instant photography -
"Oh, I want to see it right away."
And then in the 1950s, you didn't need an external meter to read the light
and have it separate from your camera - click, click.
they were all being integrated - things were becoming easier, faster.
And then in the 1970s: Instamatic.
I'm sure you remember that - you just load it in, slap the door
you don't have to focus it; it's idiot-proof.
It's like 1888 all over again - anyone could be a photographer.
And tourists everywhere had these things.
In the 1980s, Minolta came out with the very first auto-focus SLR system.
So everything's becoming more computerized.
In the 1990s - this is actually a film camera, it's not a digital camera -
this is a film camera, and it looks like a computer.
All of these things are still with us today:
in our iPhones - chk, chk.
People take pictures like this now. Weird.
And the modern digital cameras,
like that one right there.
So, what's technology doing to us?
Are we going to have robots chewing our own food
and hugging us in the future for comfort?
It's a little bizarre.
I have one of these fancy digital cameras,
and I do make all of my money with it.
I need it, and people come up to me and say,
"Oh gosh, that's a really fancy camera. I bet it takes really good pictures,"
as if the camera took the pictures all by itself.
So, people seem to think that technology
is nothing more than this candy store they can go into,
and if they just had enough money,
they could also be a brilliant whatever -
a brilliant photographer, or a brilliant -
if they just had the right car, they would win Le Mans or something, right?
This is a bit funny how people think of technology as solving their problems.
So, we have this, I think - here's a bit of social theory for you -
I think we've got this authenticity versus technology.
Technology is trying to make everything cheaper, easier, dumber, faster,
and authenticity -
this hipster-type of movement we've been hearing about?
They want to spend a little more money;
they want to take things a little slower.
They don't mind taking the tough road to do things,
and so they're not using iPads;
they're using typewriters in Starbucks and stuff like that - it's pretty funny.
But this has been around since the 60s and 70s
with the back-to-the-land movement; there's a BBC show, "The Good Life."
So people took their entire backyards and turned it into -
they'd be goats here and growing carrots and stuff,
so it's not really a new thing, but I kind of dig the idea of it.
So, back to me,
in the 90s, I taught myself photography;
I said, "I'm going to be a photographer."
So I bought these developing tanks and set up an enlarger
in the spare bedroom in my house,
and I didn't even go to school;
I just failed and failed and failed
and finally worked out how to do it,
and taught myself how to frame an image and be a photographer.
And seeing that developing tray
with that image that would slowly come out from nothing,
was magical - I was hooked.
You guys must have done that in high school, right?
All the people who were born in the 90s,
they won't get that amazing photo-club feeling in high school
and the red light, you know.
So, I still had a bit of an inferiority complex
because if anyone can just go out and buy a camera,
what makes me any better than anyone else?
So, I decided to start looking back in time
to alternative processes, as they're called -
but this was the calotype process, the actual paper negative process.
To distinguish myself,
to say, "Oh look, I'm doing this really tough thing,
and I bet you just go to the store and buy a camera,
but I'm doing this really tough thing, so ha."
And I bought all these books,
and they're from 150 and 170 years ago,
and I was reading all the recipes:
okay, buy silver nitrate,
buy potassium iodide, gallic acid, acetic acid, all that stuff,
and I built Gladys.
She's called Gladys because it's an old-timey-sounding name,
like Barbara or Edna or Ruth.
This isn't Brittany -
that wouldn't work at all.
Let's put that down there.
So, Gladys, as you can see by the slide, compared to this -
you can have different lenses on her.
She's sort of a fully-functioning, Victorian-style camera -
that's a big portrait lens on her there.
And the images I made didn't work.
The recipe? Something wrong with the recipes?
No, couldn't be the recipes; it had to be me.
No, that didn't work either - this is getting a little better,
but what are all these brown splotches on everything?
This is a nightmare.
And I finally got pretty good at doing it,
and I got completely hooked all over again
on the beautiful other-worldliness of it;
I took this a year ago,
but it looks like it's from 100 years ago.
And there's that beautiful sepia tone,
and this is flipped digitally
in Photoshop.
I haven't figured out how to make the salt prints yet;
I'm just doing the negative, calotype part.
And I discovered something called "calotype weather"
because the reason my negatives weren't working out and were going brown,
and they would work and then wouldn't work -
is because , I discovered, it's the heat;
I was doing a lot of these in July
and the heat just makes them go rotten, makes them go bad.
And I don't think it's written down anywhere -
I have a lot of these books -
so, I think I have "discovered" something about the history of photography,
in that there is such a thing as calotype weather.
Once it gets above 22 Celsius and if it's a little too humid,
it's just put your camera away.
And so, in the future, I'll write a book about calotypes
and maybe that will be in there.
And so, just to illustrate:
this is what a negative looks like -
and once again, in Photoshop I have to do this
because I haven't quite perfected the chemical way of doing it -
and this is off my little tester camera;
the little tester camera is a four by five,
not the big one like this
because this takes 12 by 12 images, so I can't be using it all the time.
And how good is this image?
We can zoom in, and we can zoom in again,
and it turns out that if you scan a 4 by 5 calotype negative,
which is a 175-year-old technology,
you can get 120 megapixel image out of it.
So in a way, this is like post-apocalyptic;
this is anachronistic,
you know, if Canon and Nikon and Ilford suddenly just ceased to exist,
I'll be okay, as long as I can get some lunar caustic.
So, this guy's 820 megapixels because its a 12 by 12 image.
Is there any - can Canon and Nikon compete with that?
Not yet, but boy.
So, how do you actually make a calotype?
I was going to make paper from scratch, but that's too insane.
So, I went to the arts supply store, and I got some vellum,
this stuff that doesn't fall apart when you get it wet several times -
you cut it to the right shape,
and then you put potassium iodide and silver nitrate on it -
this can all be done in the light -
and then you have to wash it and wash it and dry it and wash it.
And then, you take it into the darkroom
where the lights are red -
oh, thank you, ahh, there's that magical feeling again -
and you apply the silver nitrate solution, and it becomes sensitized,
and then you can load it into one of these guys here -
let's see, is this the right one?
I made this from scratch, too.
So, there's your blank paper
and then - Gladys-demo -
then you can go outside -
so the lights come back up again - "Hey, we're outside,"
and we go and we choose just the right place.
It's a bit heavy
which is why I take lots of pictures of the Exchange District
because it's close by to the studio.
So, we have to focus it by moving these things forward and back -
here, let me show you ...
simple as that -
ooh, have to get some WD-40 on it -
and you look at the image here,
and that's where I'd normally put the black focusing cloth over my head.
And then, once you've got that set up, this is the shutter.
Block out all the light,
put this guy in here - woop -
make sure nothing moves,
pull this out,
pull this off,
and you go, "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi" -
and I've got a stopwatch -
take 60 seconds at a very, very bright day
at f5.6 to get a proper image.
Put that back on there, put this back on here,
and ...
you get the image, but only after you get into the darkroom
and put developer on it and all that stuff.
That was just a magic trick.
So, where are we at now?
So this is how an image is made in the camera:
So what is up this way,
crosses and becomes upside down in the camera.
So this anachronistic photography,
where up is down and black is white
and left is right and the past is the future,
at least for me anyway,
I think this is possibly the future of photography
in the way that we're taking a bit of power back,
you know, we can do it ourselves,
and I can make better images than Nikon can even make.
There is a yearning for this anachronistic photography,
because with our iPhones,
we can buy these little apps that make old-timey-looking images -
I'm just going to put this down here -
and so there must be something in the society that wants that.
And so instead of just getting an app,
I would recommend, and my challenge for everyone here today,
is to build your own camera from scratch.
(Laughter)
No, that's ridiculous.
I'm just going to try to demonstrate here what it looks like through the camera.
So, this is upside-down -
can I bring all the lights down in the room?
Hopefully this works, please.
It should say, you can see it here: "Take the tougher road."
Can you see that here?
(Audience) Yes
Let me try to turn it a bit, so I can show you guys here,
there, can you see that?
So this funny world
which is full of contradictions and ironies and all kinds of stuff,
is where I'm going to spend my future.
I think it's quite fun, and perhaps you can join me
and mix chemicals and get stains on your fingers.
I just need to start making some positives out of my negatives.
Thank you.
(Applause)