Digital BW, The Print

My experience with camera clubs over the past 25 years has 
been overwhelmingly negative. Groucho Marx's quip about never 
wanting to join any club that would have him as a member sort of 
applies to me, even though people have repeatedly asked me to 
- they obviously didn't know me as well as they thought they did.

The problems were numerous, and I saw them coming a mile 
away: I loved 35mm, while many club members wouldn't give the 
time of day to anyone shooting smaller than medium format; 
when my landscape work was leaning toward a somewhat 
quirky sort of impressionism, it would be judges as being too 
fussily artsy(!); I would be on of the very few to show up with work 
done with lenses wider than 28mm - let's just say the judging 
and coversation regarding this one fact was interesting.  An old 
friend here in New York is a member of one of the better-known 
camera clubs here, and her experience, if anything, has actually 
been a bit worse, with crazy-harsh critiques of work of hers that I 
thought was stunning. Of course, I had warned her of this 
happening prior to her joining.

Photographers, of course, can be a highly opinionated lot (bless 
'em!), but it's also all too true that we can be an awfully
provincial 
lot as well, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the 
hothouse environment of the camera club (with the possible 
exception of the New York gallery scene).  One-upmanship plays 
hand-in-glove with this too: At the camera store, the proud owner 
of a fixed-zoom-lens digital SLR crows about how his camera 
will wipe the floor with the film-burning 35mm rangefinder slung 
over my shoulder;  someone else who just bought a MF 
rangefinder, interestingly, tells me almost exactly the same thing 
(but in the latter case is briefer, and can actually explain *why* he 
feels that way).  I simply smile wanly and ask the counter person 
for a few bricks of film and some Lyson carts.

This may be one of the most flat-out exciting periods in 
photography - on the one hand, so much in the way of 
technology-driven methods are really giving us interesting 
solutions to longstanding photographc issues (as well as 
offering, IMO, solutions in search of problems, unfortunately); On 
the proverbial other hand, we see renewed interest in *very* old 
processes, in some cases spurred on by - ironically - digital 
scanning and printing.  This, I feel, is a Very Good Thing, and 
something that would be somewhat lost in the padded...ahem, 
carpeted rooms where club members congregate every second 
Tuesday (or something).  I won't shoot on anything but film for 
the time being, but after the film is souped n' louped, it's off to
the 
scanner and printers as fast as I can go.  There's room for all of 
this, and all of us.  Process IS important, and yet we have to 
develop those processes/workflows that work for each of us, to 
get the work right for us before we get around to showing it to 
others - the moment when the work stands or falls on its own 
merit (hopefully).

And, to Bo: at least here in the States there's a time-honored 
childhood tradition regarding clubs and "clubbiness" - if they 
won't have you, go out and start your own. ;-)

 - Barrett