In the years that I travelled a lot and shot a ton of film, I collected the images in film albums and have carefully collated the film sleeves in specially-archival plastic and then housed the sleeves in specially-archival plastic binders. I then have stored the binders in safe, dry places.
Shooting a ton of film used to be bloody expensive. I shot Kodachrome 64, a range of different Ektachrome emulsions, and my old favourites, Plus-X and Tri-X. I souped all the B/W film myself, never ever trusting a lab to do what I felt gave me the best results out of the dev reel (D76 cut 1:1 with water at 68 degrees for 11 minutes with just Tri-X for example). But running colour film through a lab could be hundreds of dollars. Unless you had an “in.” I had an “in.”
I knew a top-flight service rep at Kodak. He had a penchant for trainspotting and collecting old trannies of trains and printing them up for sale at train shows. I used to make “internegatives” for him (4×5 negs of his 35mm trannies), and he’d give me fresh film in return. I used the film on three continents shooting subjects as diverse as archeology, traditional medicine and refugees. Considering internegs would generally cost $25 a piece at a lab, and I made several hundred for him over the years, and that he got film for me for free, we both got a pretty sweet deal. I’ll never forget when I asked him for 100 rolls of Kodachrome, 100 rolls of Plus-X and 100 rolls of Tri-X for one trip (to Bhutan in 1989).
But to get to the subject of this post… I realized a short while ago that I had gone to some lengths to ensure that the film I shot over the years was properly stored and looked after. The images are, after all, the best evidence of myself – of how I see – across a decade now nearly two decades later. If I ever needed to make a print, I knew where the exact neg I needed was, and that it would be instantly available for any fine print. However, with the loss of a handy darkroom for me in these later years, and with my immersion in the digital world, both professionally and creatively, I came to the sudden realization that the film I have so carefully looked after is no longer of such importance to me. We have a very good scanner, and scanning the key images into digital form makes the image itself the important artifact, and not the film. Once scanned at high resolution, I really don’t need to worry too too much about the film version any more. Well, of course I still do and won’t ever change my film archiving methods, but the point is huge to me in its implications.
I have begun cutting out the individual, key, BW frames and mounting them in slide mounts. Heresy! Heresy to separate a single frame from its brethren in sleeving. A cardinal error with slide film, for example, is to lose track of which individual image came out of which individual box. I keep all key colour slides in protective sleeving (paper and plastic film boxes emit gases which attack film emulsions over time rendering them brittle), but one still needs to i.d. the sheets properly so one knows what the heck images one is looking at. Separate out some slides from the sheet is just asking for trouble and confusion later. I know, because I have done this more than once.
But I am stunned to realize that I can clip out individual negative frames, mount them, scan them, and keep them in new sleeving for future need, and not be stricken dumb or by lightning for doing so. Its OK to do so.
The scanned image is more important now than the film image. Amazing.
I think I am 20% archivist at heart (I maintain a professional image archive at work, after all), and realizing this complexity with negative re-use seals it for me, I think. Pretty boring for anyone else, I’m sure.