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Is film dead? The question isn't really if it's dead, but when. There are still avid film shooters out there (myself included), but it's not often that we get good news. It's so bad that I've been refraining from posting some of the more depressing things I've been seeing about Kodak. What can one do when their passion has become so fleeting? One photographer has accepted the fate of film by using his 4x5 to take photographs of the analog industry's slow death.
"Over the past decade, photographer Robert Burley has traveled the world documenting the abandonment and destruction of film-based photography, namely, the factories where film was produced and the labs that developed it. Burley's atmospheric large-format photographs transport viewers to rarely seen sites where the alchemy of the photographic process was practiced over the last century-from the Polaroid plant in Waltham, Massachusetts to the Kodak-Pathé plant in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, the birthplace in 1827 of photography itself. As both fine art and documentary, The Disappearance of Darkness is an elegiac reflection on the resilience of traditional art forms in the digital era and a vital commemoration of a century-old industry that seems to have disappeared overnight." More images of Burley's work can be seen here.
- Interior of Building W3, Polaroid, Waltham, Massachusetts, 2009 (Robert Burley)