Notes on Photography: The Outmoded

He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded', in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.

Walter Benjamin on the Surrealist leader Andre Breton

Push Process is illustrated with photographs taken on black-and-white film (plus a few colour Polaroids, though these are reproduced in black and white). Even in 2000–5, the period from which the photographs date, these were obsolescent technologies. They once seemed natural or innovative, but now seem peculiar, quaint, redundant. Because they are outmoded, we become aware of their specific properties and limitations.

Here are versions of the four cameras I used to take the photographs used in the book (apologies for the image quality): a Polaroid Spectra c. 1980s; a 1955 Rolleiflex; a Voightlander–Cosina Bessa-R – mine was bought new in 2002; and a Tachihara wooden field camera c. 1980s.

A photograph is no longer a second-generation print enlarged from a negative – and before digital technology displaced film, the default state of a photograph went from being a daguerreotype (1840s), to a black-and-white print (mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, but in several different successive modes, e.g. albumen print, silver–gelatin print; and from glass–plate negatives to celluloid or acrylic strips), to a colour slide transparency (in the 60s and 70s), to a print from a colour negative (in the 80s and 90s).

To their original users, all these technologies seemed intrinsic to the definition of what a photograph was.

To use an outmoded technology is not, therefore, an invitation to nostalgia; or it need not be. It is instead an invitation to consider the results as the product of a historical process.