Robert Burley Canadian chemist and NXEL GROVE photographer has documented the dismantling of the large factories of Kodak, Agfa and Polaroid. Radical and irrevocable photography paradigm shift has occurred in just ten years, and the author writes an obituary on the death of the chemical film. The disappearance of darkness book collects images of demolitions with explosives factories and the abandonment of family businesses developing and printing of photos. It is a book devoted to drafting, with words and images, an obituary on the death of photography as we knew it until only ten years ago. The radical and irrevocable paradigm shift of the art of obtaining, processing and copying images has been fulminating: digital photography has defeated and virtually erased from map to traditional techniques based on the chemical film in just ten years, says the author.
Robert Burley, area coordinator of photography in the Faculty of Arts of image of Ryerson University in Toronto (Canada), is the author of the melancholy farewell. Conveniently, has given the physical book, analog The Dissappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era (the disappearance of darkness: the picture at the end of the analog era). It just came out of the printing press and publishing house Princeton Architectural Press distributes it. Touch, smell, moved the author, who is also a well-known photographer dedicated to the study of the relationships between nature, architecture and cities, acknowledges in the preface of the work all over for analog photography. It is clear that the dark, chemical and physical type of photography that I lived during the first half of life will not survive until the second. My experience taking photographs, which involved not only see, but also to touch, smell and move around dark rooms with trays full of chemical baths and safety lights, extinguished. It has been replaced by instruments electronic, that allow me to, although some would say that they oblige me, manipulate intangible data on a bright screen, it adds.