PICTURES OF PICTURE TAKERS OF…..

BY MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHERS SPEND A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF TIME marking the passing of various elements of their world. We chronicle the end of stuff.

Things go out of fashion. The mass mind discards ideas or ways of doing this or that. And technology, that rocket sled of change, surges madly forward in ways that keep even the most alert shooter’s eye spinning like a top.

Film, as one example taken from our field, is always about to die off, never quite breathing its last, but rising from one potential deathbed after another, always in danger of winking out forever, never quite doing it. One thing that has, in fact, shrunk nearly out of sight, however, is the list of places where film can be served or processed. In my lifetime, dedicated film/camera stores were common elements of daily life, like post offices or drugstores. Now the holy temples where film still reigns supreme are vanishing into dust in favor of mail-in or online resources. And, on most days, in digital’s second quarter century, that’s usually enough to serve a solid but diminished analog audience.

Dexter’s Camera, Ventura, California, May 2024

But I am just sentimental enough to want to make pilgrimage to where the magic is still actually made, where emulsions and paper and controlled conditions combine to produce a tangible product. Even as I myself reserve film for special projects, I treasure a trip to an honest-to-God camera shop like an archaeologist yearns for a walk-through of Tut’s tomb. The image here resulted from my recent visit to Dexter’s Camera, which has done business at the same address in Ventura, California since 1960, with no end in sight. Well, nearly no end. As I write this, the business address of Dexter’s has moved a few blocks away, meaning that you are looking here at a physical photographic space which now can only be experienced, well, in photographs. Pictures of people and places that make pictures. Film is dead, long live film.