It is, really, a time of change as the century comes to an end, both for me personally and, though it’s such a cliché, for the world around us. Locally we’re seeing fast change in our physical surroundings: the American elms are coming down left and right around us, four big dinosaurs first on 7th street. That’s the last of a pioneer legacy. Houses, too, are being smashed everywhere near the river in an, I think misguided, attempt to keep the flooding clear in case of another 1997 flood. Which, of course, only happens once a century, if that. The neighborhood Julie loved around Oak Grove High School, North Terrace and South Terrace, is being beaten to shreds by the bulldozers, all those houses from the 1920s and 30s smashed to splinters. One targeted is Ann Preston’s old house. This area flooded but once in 100 years. Is such destruction necessary?
Those are a couple physical changes—our technology is also changing the way we live and work. Computers are as cliché right now, but in the printing/publishing business, it’s caused as a great a change as the invention of moveable type. Well, almost: certainly in photography, the biggest change since Kodak’s George Eastman came out with roll film. Darkrooms, now called “wet darkrooms,” are being recycled into broom closets all over the photographic world, as computers scan and print images from negatives, and digital cameras, I’m sure, will soon replace film cameras, marking the end of a chemical legacy dating right back to Daguerre.
For the first time in history, photographers will have to learn computers, no chemistry. (Well, they already are.)
And need we talk about the Internet’s possibilities? I have already.
It is an exiting time—economically the country is at perhaps the best run it’s ever going to have. Fargo’s unemployment is lowest in the nation, at 1%. We’ll never see this again. Of course, a caveat is that low wages still plague the city’s workers, an average 20% lower than elsewhere. Wages of people like me merely reflect the state I work in. On the other hand, there is the quality of life equation: in L.A. they’re buying gasoline at stations from attendants behind bullet-proof cages, paying in advance. What’s bad about America can be experienced in microcosm in southern California.
You can’t predict what we’ll miss of today’s world a generation from now, but locally at least, I’ll bet we’ll miss the trees and the houses of today. Fargo does not have a good track record of replacing things it destroys with things of beauty. North and South Terrace are likely destined to become a hill and a lawn, if not a parking lot (but no—nothing close by makes it worth parking there).
Photographers who want to do their own photos will buy a computer and a printer—but it will cost a lot more than the old wet darkroom equipment did. In fact, I suspect the “darkroom end” of the hobby will dwindle. Just like cars today, with their computer-controlled systems under the hood, have put off a new generation of tinkerers and racers. You hear on pop radio today no odes to the automobile. You can’t really love a car you can’t tinker with . (Not to say this is so bad for those of us who no longer tinker—cars working a lot better today than they used to.) I predict “pre-computer” cars will become a hot item.
Computers regenerate themselves into newer, more powerful machines almost yearly. We throw away millions. Ironic as this seems, I predict that early “Apple IIe” machines will one day be as collectible as Model T Fords (also produced in the millions).
In any case, much of what we know today is changing, and it’s an exciting time—just as was the turn of the last century, I guess. I hope, however, considering what the first 5 decades of this century brought, that it’s not going to presage the start of this century. One day, if I live that long, they’re going to say about me, “well, what can you expect? He’s a product of the 20th century, and thinks like they did back then.” (After all, we said the same things about 19th century products, such as my grandmother.) The thing that I can’t answer is—what will “thinking like that” consist of, 30 years from now?
—Jan. 29, 1998, Fargo, North Dakota [Julie, whom I married in 1994, died in 2004. Ann Preston was a colleague at NDSU.]
OtD 