The Aesthetic Qualities of BW Film Images – by Marco Dughera

Digital has set new standards of technical image quality difficult or impossible to achieve in the film era. But technical quality and aesthetic quality do not necessarily go hand in hand. The market unsurprisingly struggled and struggles to make you think that an image is as pleasant as its technical quality. Technological advances obtained in the digital era are stunning. It has never been so easy to achieve technical quality with almost no knowledge of the imaging process: frame it, click it, save it, upload it.

On the other hand, film photography is far from dead, although it is more of a niche like classic cars. Would you take your restored Citroën Traction Avant, packed with luggage, child seats and family and travel a thousand kilometers to Normandy?  I’ll leave to you the analogy with cameras. Let’s call us snobs: the pleasure is in the process and not necessarily in the result. However, even when a film image has become a bunch of zeroes and ones, it still has a peculiar aesthetic appeal

As an exercise, I tried to analyze and deconstruct the aesthetic qualities of many images in this site. An in-depth analysis should consider much more variables like film type, lens or camera. Rather, please consider this as a stimulus for further investigations and/or discussion in the comments.

The following justaposed images try to show the impact of some of the film qualities applied to a sample image. Unfortunately, I could not find other way than to start from a digital image. Even so, this exercise isn’t about purity of medium—it’s about chasing the feeling, the texture, the imperfections that make film so uniquely evocative.

Just below the images, I’ve included quotes and links to other texts: hopefully, they’ll interest you enough you to dig deeper or see things in a new light…

“We don’t see grain. Grain is a traditional artifact of the film process. Grain gives that patina of distance, the step back from the real that helps us see the obvious – photographs aren’t transparent windows onto what is “out there”, they’re opaque at best, more a mirror turned back on the photographer than the view out if a window looking out.”
Tim Vanderweert

“Grain makes a photo a little bit less visible, a little less clear – just like our personal memories, thoughts and nostalgia from the past”
Eric Kim

“There’s no point in having a sharp image if intentions are blurred.”
Jean-Luc Godard, yes: 10 years earlier than Ansel Adams

“A better understanding of contrast and tonality can help us see (and perhaps express) the visual and emotional potential in a scene.”
Sroyon

“… is imperfection in lenses actually a potential source of perfection in the photographic outcome?”
Hamish Gill

“A photograph quotes from appearances but, in quoting, simplifies them. This simplification can increase their legibility.”
John Berger

“I cannot understand why you have to ruin all your nice images by making them in Black and White.”
my father

Understanding the different ingredients and how they work together helped me to set the direction in my pursuit of pleasant (at least to me) results. It took time, but I learned that images sometimes improve by throwing away information. The image should however retain enough detail to trigger a reaction in the viewer: finding the right balance is not easy even if the viewer is yourself.

Removing details may help to focus on the essence of an image or muddle its concept. Once you become bored of the technicalities, the attention shifts to the meaning of an image and the end reason for photography. If you’ve been there you know that it is a rabbit hole where you initially meet all types of technology geeks and the deeper you go the more mysterious encounters you make.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

Marco

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