I must admit, I've spent the past 20 years very much not missing photographic film. The fiddliness, the inconvenience, the added cost: I was in love with none of these things. Even before they were released onto the market, the idea of digital cameras made sense to me. They still do.
But every now and again, you realise how much we've lost in the rush for convenience. And here's a new book that brings that rushing back.
The concept behind it is both simple and genius. With over 700 images from National Geographic's archives, it's essentially working history of American photojournalism, one state at a time.
Launched to mark the nation's 250th anniversary, it opens with with B. Anthony Stewart's 1957 cover shot of the Mayflower II sailing into New York Harbor under an airship.
It then moves across the states and decades in a sometimes bewildering array of images, captured using a range of techniques, from the autochromes and black-and-white plates of the 1920s and 1930s through the photographic film era and eventually the digital age.
A grand sweep
Surfers hauling boards up Mākaha Beach in 1961. A Union Carbide worker eating lunch in 1971. A New Orleans brass band performs two years after Hurricane Katrina. It all adds up to astonishing sweep of history, culture and geography that can become quite intoxicating.
One moment you're looking at a black-and-white 1953 shot of a woman skiing the Rockies in a sleeveless blouse and cat-eye sunglasses, the next you settle on a speedboat threading a snaking route through Reflection Canyon. Same country, same magazine; different time, different way of seeing.
Clifton Adams's 1932 shot of Philadelphians filing through an archway at City Hall has a single hanging lightbulb doing most of the compositional work. Because that's what Adams had: one frame, one chance, no chimping the back of the camera to check your exposure.
Compare that with Michael Melford's 2006 Utah canyon shot, made possible only by digital's forgiving latitude and by the damming of the Colorado River. The technology and the landscape had both changed beyond all recognition.
To my tastes, though, the Kodachrome years – roughly the 1940s through the 1970s – are where the book really resonates. J. Baylor Roberts's 1950 shot of a rodeo cowboy signaling "Time!" moments after a calf-roping win has the saturated, slightly hard-edged color that only that stock could deliver. I'm not saying I'm about to go out and score a vintage camera right now. But I'm certainly very tempted.
At almost 800 pages, packed with pictures, this extensive volume is in no way a casual read. But as a reference to how light, film stock and editorial decisions have evolved across a century of one magazine, it's absolutely delightful.
National Geographic: The United States of America is published by TASCHEN, $150 / £125. Hardcover, 10.6 x 14.7 in., 13.52 lb, 792 pages.
