Film has seen better days. With legends like Kodak's Kodachrome gone, and staples like Fujifilm's Neopan 400 very recently following suit, most news about film is met with dismay and long drawn out "No's" (if you doubt it, check out the comment section on the Neopan 400 and Provia 400X discontinuation announcement linked above).
Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo closed its doors at the end of last year. Given the transformation photography has gone through over the past decade, it hardly came as a surprise. At its core, the success, survival, and eventual demise of 60 Minute Photo is just another familiar story of a business fighting against the moving current of technology. It’s closure, however, reveals something important, something personal. It represents a shift in how we create and preserve our memories and a deepening of the divide between customer and proprietor.
The Economist has published an article on photographic film's "transition from the mass market to the artisanal," writing that the future is bleak for film as we know it:
Consumers and professionals ditched film first. Then health-care services, which used it for X-rays, shifted to digital scans. The final blow came with the film industry's switch to digital projection. IHS iSuppli [...] estimates filmmakers consumed 2.5m miles [...] of film each year for the distribution of prints at its height. That was just a few years ago. By 2012 this plunged by two-thirds. In 2015 it will be next to nothing.
Since 2005, photographer and photography lecturer Robert Burley has been documenting the demise of film photography through film photographs. He has traveled around the world with his 4x5 field camera in tow, capturing the demolition of buildings, the equipment that once powered a giant industry, and the desolation of factories that were once teeming with workers.
The photograph above shows a crowd watching the implosions of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York on October 6, 2007.
Clemson University is apparently ditching film photography and going digital. The public South Carolina-based school has just turned to government surplus auctions to unload its analog gear, and the equipment is being snatched up for ridiculously low prices. The lot of 9 "excellent condition" Hasselblad 500 EL/M medium format camera bodies seen above was just sold for $1,200, which comes out to about $133 for each camera (granted, there are some taxes and processing fees tacked on).
Kodak may be planning to sell its film division, but for the time being the business is still under the company's control. The company announced yesterday that T-MAX P3200 is the latest in its lineup to be discontinued, citing the plummeting demand for ultra-high speed black-and-white film.
Less than a month after Kodak announced the sale of its photographic film business, Fujifilm has some downer news of its own: the end of its motion picture film business.
It's a sad day for film photographers: Kodak has announced that it will sell off its camera film business, one of the huge pillars of what made Kodak Kodak in the eyes of consumers around the world. It's yet another step in the company's effort to climb out of bankruptcy, which it hopes to do by next year, and transform itself into a commercial printing company.
Good news for film photography lovers: Kodak film may be okay for at least a few more years. The company has signed new contracts with four major Hollywood movie studios that will allow it to provide film for movies at least through 2015.
This year hasn't been very friendly to Fujifilm's film lineup. The company has already announced the discontinuation of APS films, the cutting of some less popular films, and a worldwide price increase. The bad news doesn't end there: the British Journal of Photography is reporting that the company is making major cuts to its popular Velvia brand, a film known for its resolution and color saturation.
Kodak announced today that it has decided to discontinue its color reversal (AKA slide) films due to a steady …
Over the past year, major movie camera manufacturers ARRI, Panavision and Aaton have all quietly stopped manufacturing film cameras …