You deserve each other: generational clash in photo forums

In reading Ed Worthington’s essay on Emulsive, “Rant: Analysing analogue grandpas. Or, sucking the joy out of photography online since Jan 1st 1983,” I was confused. Who was online in 1983? Curiosity got the better of me. It took me two-thirds of the article to understand that the author was complaining about gatekeepers, not admitting to being one. This may have been an error in my organic AI system – you see, humans are capable of snapping judgments on exceeding little (or incomplete) information. But having reassessed the question, I think the ambiguity bears on something else: gatekeepers and TikTok-ing n00bs are two sides of the same coin. I’m not Captain Kirk, but I am tired of being caught between analog-old-timers and the “film stock” generation. It should not surprise you that this is largely a fight between Boomers and the Gen Zers who are young enough to be their grandchildren. But those of us GenXers and Millennials who witness this should thing a minute about why this acrimony exists.

The Grups

The group that Worthington identifies as “analogue grandpas,” (but keeping with the Star Trek theme, let’s call them the “Grups”) is searching for relevance. Most Boomers (and even older Gen Xers) grew up in an era where there were a lot of films, a lot of developers, a new camera coming out every week, commissioned salespeople at camera shops on every corner, one-hour photo in every mall, and even the prospect of spying a stray nipple in Popular Photography. Make no mistake about it – Grups lived through film photography’s golden age, and there never was (or will be) a time in which so much film was used and so much knowledge was accumulated. As a business, photography was almost always local, relied on high barriers to entry, and provided little enough competition that bad or creepy photographers could make a living. In that era, a self-made print on someone’s wall might as well have been a della Robbia. Grups even faced ur-Grups, who told them that things would never be the same without Panatomic X or Kodachrome 25 and that multigrade RC enlarging paper was for p*ssies.

A large portion of amateurs in this group would have hit 60 around (or a couple years after) the turn of the century – precisely the time that the digital revolution was rendering their accumulated knowledge and experience obsolete. Everything in that pile of musty photography magazines was pointless (even the nipples were no longer novel). Nobody really remembers this, but in the early 2000s, the Nikon D1 was a Big Thing, and Leica was about to go broke. This was the nadir of film photography. Or maybe the lead-up to a Dead Cat Bounce.

Today, the Grups assert dominance and worth by talking about Something No One Else Knows. This hermetic knowledge is usually related to Things No One Does Anymore or How You Youngsters Have it So Damn Easy or even Stuff that Involves Electronics is Not Photography. Flash by user groups frequented by the Grups, usually related to speciality porn like Leicas and Rolleis, and Photrio (f/k/a APUG) and you will see all kinds of information exchanged that has virtually no relevance to most people who shoot film today. Leitz Midland, now-dead photo techs, pyrogallol, split-contrast optical printing, you name it. Usually, this is harmless. Some participants use this information to further an actual present operational interest. For others, it’s a nostalgia trip. Phototrio might be the most unusual venue, accommodating filtration for those who somehow are triggered by the mention of analog or hybrid photography. Spoiler alert: if you had photos printed at minilabs from the mid-1990s on, you were into hybrid photography.

Miri

The younger group, which we’ll personify as “Miri,” has discovered film photography. As in actually discovered it. Miri has her dad’s Pentax K1000, or some point-and-shoot she found at the local Salvation Army. Miri is an enthusiast, Miri has questions, Miri wants to learn, but Miri never wants to be told that she is wrong. Or that her pictures are sometimes, just sometimes, by historical measures, mediocre.

At the time Miri started photographing things, film was some weird buggy-whip thing that was obsolete by her early childhood. At that point, digital completely dominated the market, and people started using smartphone cameras instead of compact cameras. By the time she was a teenager, actual cameras had almost stopped being a thing with people under 40.

Miri got curious because Instagram had vintage filters. Miri took up film photography because it was different from the anodyne, too-perfect digital photography everyone else was doing. She is fairly retiring, generally discussing film photography with people of like mindset, marveling at results, whether they came intentionally or by accident. Miri does not sit in front of an enlarger printing one out of every 36 pictures. Miri’s generation scans everything, sometimes handing over film to be processed and scanned, meaning she “pushes the button, and someone else does the rest” – in essence doing exactly as much of the photographic process as George Eastman wanted people to do when he founded Kodak. In fact, aside from the fact that she can’t chimp the images as she takes them on a screen, it is actually no different in result – and for the most part process – from digital photography.

It is difficult for Grups to appreciate this, but the product lines of most film manufacturers have contracted to serve the preferences of Miri’s generation. The engineers who designed any of those products are long gone, and most of the machinery for making it was scrapped decades ago. Things are very much in maintenance mode, and even though every once in a while a Film Ferrania cooks up an ISO 6 color film (don’t let the eager crowds break the door down there…), the unfinished and terrible nature a lot of emulsions, er, film stocks are reflective of how much knowledge is just gone. The old days are not coming back, not like Grups would like.

The Conflict

Grups occasionally wander into general photography discussions to flex their obsolete knowledge, just like how back in the day, they would wander into a garage to talk about a four-barrel carburetor. The difference between what they think is interesting and what others do is hard to illustrate. Maybe start with the idea of someone teaching a sex-ed class while referencing pessaries and diaphragms. Phototrivia, ancient birth control, and obscure muscle cars are, of course, of academic interest. But they are not the kind of things that “the kids” (or even most adults) think about on a day-to-day basis. These irrelevant discussions largely get shrugged off. Because the interwebs let you do that.

The real conflict erupts when a Grup tells Miri that her pictures are terrible, she is doing things wrong, and she does not have the first clue what she is doing. Or that she should feel lucky that things are so easy now. The riposte from the collected Miris is a complaint the Grup is “gatekeeping,” either directly in the discussion or a ping-back to it.

This word came into common use in 1872, and Google’s n-grams suggest that its use has modestly increased in the past 5 years. “Gatekeeping” as a pejorative means that someone is trying to bully someone out of a hobby by acting like there is one set of official received knowledge – and everyone else is wrong.

Sometimes Miri’s friends hit right back at some bumbling Grup, calling him an old man. Sometimes in reading these discussions, one can’t but wonder who is gatekeeping whom and who is gaslighting whom.

This of course made me wonder if “gaslighting” — what grups are also probably doing (discrediting people by undermining the notion of their sanity)— had a similar change. Nope. Gaslighting came out of nowhere and is now far more popular.

Back to the point, I guess. Generational clash comes up infrequently, but when it does, it sucks up the collective mindshare of the group involved – and more. There are the direct discussions on Facebook, Reddit, and newer social media where the fight is taking place – and then the indirect spillover where people write articles about their most recent spat and then post that onto social media. And then a second commentator criticizes the article written by the participant. Way to make a mountain out of a molehill.

What Would Jim Kirk Do?

First, it goes without saying that Jim Kirk would immediately violate the Prime Directive. Since he is hot off the heels of a trip to the Planet of Greek Gods, he would then whip out a copy of Aristotle to point out that intergenerational griping, especially by old men, has been going on for 2,800 years:

Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately….They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things-and that means having exalted notions.

— Rhetoric, Part 12.

Second, Kirk would deliver the following points, in Torontonian (er, Iowan) staccato, with seemingly even more ellipses than the reading above. You… should…

Try to	Try not to
Understand your general audience, its experience level, and its level of empathy.	Barge into a place without any foreknowledge of its gestalt and start attacking things.
Ask informed questions that indicate that you have some interest in something and are willing to do your part to learn. Context is good.	Do not go off on someone just because they are asking a question that you know the answer to.
Understand the value of the information you are offering and speak when you actually have something to say.	Change the subject. A question about something never merits a threadjack to something else.
Understand that you do not know everything. No one does, no matter what the skill level.	Overplay your hand and act as if you have secret knowledge or have discovered something. Neither has likely happened.
Understand that things were in fact harder in the past.	Act in an ageist way. You were young once, and you will be old someday.
Learn from the mistakes of others	Repeat them needlessly.

Finally, Kirk would point out that this type of conflict is exactly who we are as a species. Since the first Neanderthal family dinner, younger adults have rebelled against older ones. Who knows what the adaptive advantage is, but maybe it came from the need to diversify ideas in a bid not to be eaten by leopards. Or maybe the frontal lobe only really develops by experiencing opposing ideas and mistakes. We know now that that development is not complete until the mid-20s. And no doubt, there is a major intergenerational knowledge loss. People who complain about it were guilty of it.

Finally, something like an ancient photography book comes out of a chest, both sides hug each other, and the Enterprise departs, usually leaving some unneeded phasers, communicators, or other next-level, completely harmless tech behind. That roll of Tech Pan you handed a teenager won’t cause any problems, I swear.

In sum

It is undeniably entertaining to watch intergenerational warfare in photo discussions. The people who engage in it most get what they deserve. That said, we should not encourage it – the lack of polite discourse does not help the hobby.