Things are supposed to get better. Photos were archaic things on toxic plastics, coaxed to life by toxic chemicals (that would do in a pinch if you run out of whisky, or live on a dry reserve) and the grains got finer, then colour, then better colour, then Kodachrome (sorry Paul, they took it away, but there's an Instagram filter that's pretty close...) Then digital, grainy little pixelated crap photos, but you could take a million million of them. You could see the photos before the memory of the event had faded, or before the event was even over. Better.
Then more pixels, and 3D, and video, and high definition video, and 4K videos, then 4K videos in your phone.
Better. Always better.
I shot these in native black and white. My little Fuji (and most cameras) will let you do that. The Fuji has a list of a dozen or so film types it tries to mimic, and various filters too. Things get better, and we ask them to mimic things from our past; all that technology working hard to make things look like they used to look. It was strange looking at a representation of what I was about to take a picture of in black and white. When you shoot black and white film you look at a colour thing and then later you get to see it in black and white. I might guess that every single photo I've taken has been seen in colour and then turned into black and white. This is the first time I've looked through a view finder and seen a black and white version of what I was going to take a photo of before I took a photo of it.
It's not always about better.
Sometimes it's about taking a photo of something in the moment, and understanding what it is in that moment, where it came from, where it's going, and where it is in a moment. That shitty little house will be knocked down soon. It's been there for 60 or so years and I've spent much more time in consideration of 1/60th of a second of its existence. In black and white. And grey.
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