The black-and-white landscape photographs in Welcome to Hard Times—the opening exhibit of the Cleveland Print  Room—are a boisterous amalgam of primitive and high tech. The enlargements  are digital. But photographer Vaughn  Wascovich captured them on a DIY pinhole camera made of wood, and processed the images by hand, spraying,  splattering and brushing chemicals on the paper like a jazz man improvising in collaboration with the subject. The results  pop and sparkle with static visual noise, dusty pocks of blackness and shades of gray. If you could see the friction mixed  with music when the needle brings to life the jagged groove of an old vinyl record, it might look something like this.

 

The technique celebrates the photographer’s active role in the process. It’s a great and telling show to open the  Cleveland  Print Room, a new, cooperative photography studio and gallery in the St. Clair Superior neighborhood of  Cleveland. Regardless of whether Wascovich means any commentary on the state of photography in the early twenty- first century, his work says something about what’s going on in Cleveland. In the commercial world, analog photography has been completely overwhelmed by digital convenience. But some artists are rediscovering the old way–not only for  nostalgia, but for the hands-on creativity and the materials that define those techniques. As examples of that  rediscovery, artist Christoper Pekoc points to big name artists like Sally Mann, who in the 1990s began to use the wet  plate collodion technique, exploiting its deep, dark blacks and unusual shades of gray, or Chuck Close, who—regarding  his series of startlingly detailed daguerreotype portraits, told The Guardian, “I’m not interested in daguerreotypes  because it’s an antiquarian process; I like them because, from my point of view, photography never got any better than it  was in 1840.”
Pekoc curated The Janus Effect at Tregoning and Company, an exhibit of the old school mixed with new ideas, which Bill  Tregoning says “looks forward and back.” It includes works of Donald Black, Jr. who creates images with photogravure;  Gabriel Gonzalez, who uses “the more recently abandoned process of developed film;” and Greg Martin, and Jeannette Palsa, both working in wet plate collodion—a 150 year-old process in which a plate of glass is dipped in chemical baths  before being exposed—still wet—in a camera, and then developed as a negative.

 

 

“Some people are tired of digital perfection,” Pekoc says. “The digital world is all about pushing buttons. It doesn’t fill the  desire in some people for working with their hands.”
For those people, there’s the Cleveland Print Room. The nonprofit offers members access to photo processing  equipment, classes and seminars, and exhibit space specifically for photography. Upcoming programs include an event  with the creative lens manufacturer Lensbaby, and a show called Home Grown, which will bring together Northeast Ohio  photographers and the local food movement. Founder Shari Wilkins says the plan to open the studio evolved  from an  alignment of people and circumstances. A collector of old photos since a trip to Europe in the mid-eighties, she more  recently discovered a market for them. As she had more contact with collectors and photographers, she saw a demand  for facilities and exhibit space. At the same time schools and art centers began downsizing their darkrooms: equipment  was there for the taking. So, inspired by other work-oriented studios like Zygote Press and the Morgan Conservatory— she opened the Cleveland Print Room.

 

 

For young photographers, the old processes are entirely new. For some old pros, it’s the only kind of photography they  take seriously. Herb Ascherman made a career as a commercial photographer and continues in his extensive travels to  shoot black and white portraits and landscapes—including his ArtFace feature for CAN Journal— with a 60 year-old,  8X10 Dierdorff view camera. He owns a digital camera, but only for quick shots he wants to e-mail. He doesn’t consider  this or any color format to be his “serious” work.

 

 

Ascherman says his commitment to black and white film is grounded in its durability. “The majority of all color C –  prints–machine processed from the mid-sixties until pigment printers were introduced a few years ago–will fade, discolor and virtually disappear.”
Of course, as photography collector Fred Bidwell says, film photography itself may completely disappear. Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell’s collection, which they’ve begun to exhibit at Transformer Station, includes a commissioned series of Cuyahoga River bridges shot by Vaughan Wascovich, and photographs of all varieties—digital and old school. In one  corner of the gallery are three gel-silver prints of transit cars, so sharp as to look like stills, shot by Adam Magyar with a high tech scanner as the trains rolled by. Beneath that is a large print made by Adam Fuss using an “alternative” analog  process- -placing a brood of snakes on the large sheet of photo paper and exposing it to light. It looks like Arabic  lettering. Fred Bidwell says what matters to him is not the process by which a photo is made, but the image that results.  He appreciates nostalgia, but predicts that market forces will eventually mean the end of analog photography. “Photographic film and paper require factories to be produced. The economies of maintaining these factories are  vaporating. Gradually, nevitably, analog photography will become the artistic equivalent of civil war reenactments.”
Indeed, Jim Matthews finally shuttered the East 22nd Street photo processing shop LabWork after a run of 54 years. The  shop is packed with photos of Cleveland history, from buildings long gone to shots of Jim Brown and Michael Stanley  in  their youth. Film processing and pr i n t i ng are “completely gone, commercially,” he says. “Whether the artistic aspect can sur vive, . . . I think it will always be around, but it will get harder and harder to find places to do it.” He plans to help out at the Print Room.
But the Print Room is not the only sign of life for analog photo business. Clevelander Scott Meivogel opened his analog  camera and supply shop, Aperture, in a Tremont storefront in the fall of 2010. The opening night Polaroid portrait party  had a line out the door. Earlier that year, a company called The Impossible Project began to fill the void left behind when  Polaroid stopped making “instant” film: they started manufacturing their own new line. Aperture has become one of the  company’s biggest retail outlets.
And other aspects of the business have grown. Traditional 35 mm cameras and film now outsell Polaroid cameras and  supplies. Meivogel has even begun to sell pinhole cameras—hand crafted out of wood by him and his father. A  promotional poster describes them as “Modernly Nostalgic,” but it seems there’s more to it than that.