A photograph is an image, a “graphic” created with light, “photos.” With the advent of digital photography, some of the lines have been blurred and shifted when considering the traditional definition of “photography”. The image that is created in the digital camera and saved to a card still needs the light aspect for its creation. However, the creation of the physical print no longer requires light-sensitive paper, numerous chemicals and arrangements for silver waste disposal.
Finishing my Library Science Master’s degree with the Archives and Records Management specialization in the middle of a tough economic time finds me back where I was before I ever left for college; the one-hour photo lab of a major retailer. Except this time things are different. There are no liquid chemicals. We do not develop film. There is no light sensitive paper or light-tight boxes to change under a black bag. I’ve been out of the business for about 3 years and look how much has changed. Any other 3 years from the 1970s to early 2000 and the only changes would include the speed of the machine, but not the basic process of the printing of the images.
Instead, there are instant print kiosks using thermal ribbon. Most of the prints come of off the laser printer which uses colored toner. Toner, I’ve learned, is colored powder containing polymers (plastics). It is placed on the paper and then superheated to lock in the image. It is much like a home color laser printer, only industrial-size and uses black, yellow, magenta and cyan toner cartridges. Other new additions to the previous lab I worked in are an in-house wide format color photo laser printer and Xerox color printer which assists in making more complicated products such as photo books and scrapbook pages.
When I learned that we were to have a dry lab at the store, I was thoroughly disappointed. I enjoyed working with the chemicals and the challenge of loading paper or working with a complicated roll of film by depending on my sense of touch only. Now, essentially, we literally only print pictures. Without the light-shining-on-chemically-treated-paper method, I’ve had to re-work my definitions in my head. While it may sound incredibly picky and insignificant to some, I do not believe that “we” at the lab create “photos” for customers anymore. The customer creates the photograph that is saved to the digital media. We create prints for them.
A question that may arise at this point is: “Is it possible to create “photographs” from digital media using the light sensitive process?” The answer is yes. It requires a hybrid machine, which was one of the first considerations of the lab I first worked at from 2001-2006. We used a Fuji machine that could accept digital files and print them onto light-sensitive photo paper, in addition to printing images from film negatives. The current lab I’m at has the capability to create reprints from negatives as well as from slides, but the machine was not created nor set up with those original image-holding media in mind. The film scanner is now an accessory for the machine, whereas in the past that was the only way of getting an original image from the media to the paper.
Now, my curiosities are to test the longevity of each type of print processing and find the best in the long term. In the near future, I hope to obtain prints from both processes, as well as from different types of machines and subject them to the elements in various types to assess their durability, paper quality and color fastedness. That is for another time.