This is an English re-write of the a the entry 7th September on my Swedish blog, which was written three weeks after my return from a walking tour, backpacking on Vindellfjäll in the north west of Sweden. About a month earlier I had bought a compact ‘analogue’ camera, a Minox GT35, an 1980′s design classic, light, neat and convenient. I wanted to try leaving digital technology behind for a few days, experience the feeling of ‘ordinary’ film again and to have some real slides from the tour. One might say it was just a touch of nostalgia. Yet there is a fundamental inequality between film and the digital image. It’s about the concept of the original, the source image. When I pick up one of my ‘diapositive’ slides I know that just that little rectangle of film I hold in my hand was there with me, in my camera, at the instant the picture was created. That very piece of film I’m looking at was was physically present, absorbed and captured the impression of the light. Just like the impression on my eyes and my memory it is physically unique, something delicate and precious.

For example, I have in my possession a collection of diapositive slides made in June 1983, from a cycle tour on the Greek mainland. One of these pictures shows a herd of goats in a meadow in the foothills of Mount Kalidromos. It is early in the morning. The night before I had fallen asleep gazing up at the stars and had just been woken by the soft jangling of goat-bells and the sound of the creatures grazing in the long grass where I lay. I took out my camera, a Pentax MX, focussed, set the aperture by the light-meter and pressed the shutter. For a few milliseconds the film was exposed and the picture was etched in the film as an invisible pattern of chemically changed material. A few weeks later I got the film back from the laboratory where the picture had been ‘coloured in’ by the developing process. At that time I was twentyfour years old and lived in a student room in a village called Chilworth, near Southampton. One evening in April 2005 I took out the slides and showed them here at home in Solna. When I saw the picture in question it was of course the very same little rectangle of film that was there with me with the goats in the meadow. The light shone through in the reverse direction through the film and through the projector lens the image was focused on a reflective canvas screen. The scene in the meadow was recreated from the same thin layer of photographic material that had captured the image. The experience of seeing it again, after such a long time and with such physical continuity, inspired me to write a short text called Vintergatan , the Milky Way.

With slides and negatives there is a certain, tangible magic, just as with an original, handwritten manuscript. It is something raw an primitive, like looking down and seeing the tracks of a wild animal, or running one’s fingers over the symbols of an ancient inscription in stone. Such direct sensation and physical proximity is not accessible through the digital domain.

The concept of the ‘original’ in art is grounded in just this physical continuity. With analogue photography and the photochemical techniques of film there is a unique, tangible and enduring a source image: a diapositive, negative or polaroid that was created at the instant of exposure. For the digital image, which consists of a matrix of numbers that be copied infinitely without change, the source is neither uniquely identifiable nor materially tangible. The digital image and the exposed film are image-forms with fundamentally different coupling to the physical world.

With a digital camera, it may be argued, there is an ‘original’ file created, just as in a film camera, when the shutter is released. That file is, however, merely a copy of the ‘original’ matrix of numbers generated by the image sensor which is transferred to the camera’s internal memory. The copy is of course only exact if the cameras RAW format is used, rather than an approximation such as JEPG. Such controlled inexactness is, however, of minor importance. The single most important distinction is the digital image not carried by a material object that was present and participating in the depicted scene.

Does it really matter, all that about the original? If the image maker aims to be a great artist and sell their pictures then it matters a great deal. The original creation of a known artist is always highly valued, even when authentic copies are available. The physical original is also important if one is sentimental or religious. One might wish to collect objects connected with something revered or of great historical significance. It is apparent, however, that we live in age where such physical continuities are no longer seen as something valuable. Frequently the perfect digital creation has a higher commercial value than any physical original. Who wants to fiddle about with a collection dusty slides or negatives when they can quiclly manipulate and perfect digital images on a screen? For future generations it seems the material of negatives and slides are largely things of the past. Even sentimental old men like me do most of their photography using digital technology.

I spent a whole evening wrestling with a scanner to get one film from this summer’s fell-walking into digital form. The results were not impressive. The scanner, a Plustek OpticFilm 7200 I bought three years ago, is a fixed focus device and lacks the controls needed for any serious work. Still I offer here three pictures from July on Vindelfjäll. They are of course not the film that was with me on that journey. Those originals can not be shared and distributed as can these matrices of numbers.