Split screen: If we're embracing digital, why are we so nostalgic about the old ways?

Much of the music we listen to, films we watch and photographs we look at are now created digitally. It should mean sharper images and clearer sound: progress, in other words. But that's not how some artists – and, it seems, many of us – feel, writes UNA MULLALLY

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY has revolutionised film, photography and music, providing endless creative opportunities and choices in how things are made and the formats they’re presented in. But in switching so many creative industries to digital, what have we lost and what have we gained? Has digital fulfilled its promise of perfection – and if not, then where is it leading us?

We’re on the cusp of analogue methods’ being lost forever, consigned to an archive where labour took priority over convenience and where the time taken to make something took priority over immediacy. With digital methods making things look and sound different, does that difference really mean “better”?

Increasingly, we want technology to remind us of the products that preceded it, to have a feel of authenticity, while not forsaking modern convenience. It’s called skeuomorphism: a design mimics a preceding product even if it no longer serves any purpose.

It can be as simple as fake brick lines painted on a plastered wall, bulbs shaped like flames on a chandelier, or a woodgrain print on a Formica table. It has been embraced by the digital world: the pretend rivets in the ‘paper’ of Apple’s digital calendar; the Polaroidesque border on an Instagram photo; the sound that plays when you press the shutter button on a digital camera.

With each new digital technology there has been a promise that it’s better than the last, so why are we still trying to imitate what we already had?

“With high-end fashion [photographs] in Dazed Confused and i-D [magazines] they’re shooting digitally and have a technician there who is making it look like film,” says Richard Gilligan, a sought-after Irish photographer. “Why don’t you just shoot film?”

Last Saturday, on Record Store Day, music fans filled record shops as if they were at gallery open days, buying limited-edition vinyl records and, yes, cassette tapes. Even though accessing music is easier than ever, and storage no longer requires walls of shelves, there’s still nostalgia for the hard copy, as if the convenience of digital music has erased some of the charm.

It’s reminiscent of when Arctic Monkeys, themselves children of the digital revolution, sang about music being made for ringtones: they were insinuating that some of the magic of creating music was lost to digital sound.

Garret “Jacknife” Lee is an Irish producer who has worked on albums by Regina Spektor, Kasabian, Snow Patrol, Bloc Party and REM. Digital technology has allowed him and millions of others to create sounds that weren’t possible 30 years ago.

“There’s a huge amount of romanticising going on about analogue tape, valves and old equipment,” Lee says. “I hear it from young engineers that were born after Pro Tools [audio production software] was developed and who read about tape in audio magazines: ‘Analogue is better, dude.’ It’s the hip thing to say. I hear it from older engineers singing about the old days. I honestly can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s different. Different formats cause different decisions to be made [in the production process]. Early digital-recording quality was poor, but even the first samplers have a unique quality that is highly desirable now.”

As for the quality of the sound we’re listening to, which is affected by the way most digital files are compressed – to make them smaller and therefore more portable, for example, in iPods – Lee says, “You would think progression should be linked to quality, but it’s not. Progression here means access. It’s like discussing the quality of paper as I’m reading from a Kindle. It’s moot. The reason why the record business is in trouble is because it’s not being led by the labels. It’s being led by the consumers. The consumers said they don’t need high-quality recording. They will listen from YouTube. It’s a bit like parents saying to their kids, ‘Eat your greens’: ‘You must appreciate higher-quality audio recordings, children; you’re not hearing their full frequency spectrum.’ They don’t want it. Maybe later, but not now.”

Yet some bands persist in recalling the magic of analogue sounds. On Foo Fighters’ most recent album, Wasting Light, Dave Grohl said computers were banned from his garage, where they recorded. Butch Vig, the album’s producer, had to relearn editing techniques such as cutting tape with a razor blade and using a manual mixing desk. Does it sound any better? Grohl and the band maintain that analogue recordings give an authenticity that Pro Tools can try to re-create but in reality ends up manufacturing.

In film it’s not only consumers who have pushed the digital charge but also the industry. “A huge amount is about the democratisation of it. Everyone gets a shot to shoot their film,” says Tim Fleming, an Irish cinematographer who has worked on films including Gladiator and Once. “Students can go out and shoot on Canon 5D Mark IIs. And that’s great, but it falls apart very quickly when you put it on a big screen. You can’t really blame people, but it feels to me that we may have gone too quickly.”

Although, according to Fleming, shooting films on celluloid rather than digitally costs only about 10 to 12 per cent more at the time, the real expense for the film industry has been in distribution. In the US it costs about €1,000 to produce a 35mm print of a film. By the time you’ve multiplied that by the thousands of cinemas in the States, and indeed around the world, you have an extremely expensive distribution network. Distributing a digital copy costs about a tenth as much, so studios save a huge amount. This is particularly true given that cinemas foot the cost of upgrading to digital projectors (a changeover that Avatar quickened when the biggest film of 2009 could be shown only in the new format) and that cinemagoers continue to pay the same price for their tickets. IHS Screen Digest forecasts that by 2015 just 17 per cent of global cinemas will still be showing 35mm. LA Weekly recently reported that the English film-maker Christopher Nolan had invited several of the biggest directors in Hollywood, among them Michael Bay, Jon Favreau and Eli Roth, to a screening of the first six minutes of The Dark Knight Rises, his forthcoming Batman film. Nolan told his audience that he had an ulterior motive for bringing them there, then appealed to them to defend 35mm film and to stop the relentless march of digital.

“Once you start to blow it up to a 70ft screen, that’s where it falls short,” says Fleming of digital filming. “One of the things at Sundance this year was how well the films shot on film were being responded to . . . Without being cynical, I think if you’re only going to get your film made on digital, than do it. I shot Once on Handycams, and some of the footage in it was actually shot on telephones, but that’s because it was meant to be a diary, so we bought into the thing on low-budget digital – that was a creative choice.”

Fleming says some others in the film industry have also now realised that the move to digital may have happened too fast. “It was going to be that digital was going to [coexist with] film,” he says. Now “it’s like, ‘Oh s***, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.’ ” So, for example, although shooting digitally presents endless opportunities for visual effects, those effects are created in the postproduction stage rather than during filming – the traditional heart of the process. And, ironically, some of the effort goes into trying to create an image that looks as if it was shot on celluloid.

Richard Gilligan, the photographer, calls the move to digital a double-edged sword. When you work in advertising or commercial photography, he says, “you know what you’re getting with digital, and the pressure is off. The margin for error is extended.” In fact, digital photography means “you can get away with murder”, according to Gilligan. Being able to fix mistakes in Photoshop has been a godsend, for example. It also means that anyone with a bit of know-how can make an image look good. Instead of laborious filtering and printing processes, you can click a button to emulate them.

But that doesn’t mean digital formats can make all photographs stand up to scrutiny. “As good as an Instagram shot is going to look on your iPhone,” Gilligan says, “if you try to print that any bigger than four inches and put it on a gallery wall, it’ll look s***.”

Gilligan says he uses a digital camera for the vast majority of work he is commissioned to do, but when it’s his own work, for exhibitions, he shoots with film. “You can’t beat the feeling and warmth that you get when shooting film, the magic to it and psychological process of not knowing what you’re getting, and creatively trying to make better images.”

“But I don’t want to be a snob about it. It’s like colour photography: at one time everyone believed fine-art photography could only be black and white. There’s enough room for film and digital at the moment.”

And, Gilligan says, he knows he has sometimes been commissioned “purely because people know I can shoot film”. He shot artwork for the debut Villagers album, for example. “When I pitched that to Domino [the record label] they let me shoot film. That was done on an out-of-date Polaroid black-and-white film, and it worked so well with everything that Conor [O’Brien, of Villagers] was doing. For me, the simpler I keep it the better the result. But everyone’s different,” he says.

“I’m the last of a dying breed in Ireland. Most people I know have fully switched over. Commercially, nobody uses it any more. If I’m getting stuff hand-printed, I have to get it sent to London. That’s the reality of it. But I just love film. If someone turned around and said, ‘It’s gone,’ I’m sure I’d find away of embracing digital fully.”

It sounds as if he could be tempted to abandon film eventually. “Now you have digital medium-format cameras [which professionals use for some of their highest-quality photographs]. Hasselblad have one that’s about €30,000, and it’s insane the quality you get: it’s close where people can’t really tell the difference.”

Garret Lee says, “I don’t care what I’m recording with . . . I use digital and analogue. Opting for one or the other seems perverse. There is no ‘better’ way of working. We’ll be romanticising whatever it is we are doing now in 20 years.”

Keeping it analogue

Photography: Bill Cunningham As documented in the film Bill Cunningham New York, this influential fashion and street style photographer still gets his rolls printed at a small developer near the New York Times office before scanning them for reproduction on the page.

Film: Christopher Nolan One of the few blockbuster directors sticking to film, Nolan shot an hour of The Dark Knight Rises, his forthcoming Batman film, on Imax cameras, which use 70mm film to produce images about 10 times larger than standard, creating an almost visually immersive experience. (He used 35mm and 65mm film to shoot the scenes with dialogue, to avoid the noise of Imax cameras.)

Music: Ethan Johns Johns still tends to record straight to 2in multitrack tape. He beat Flood and Paul Epworth to win this year's Brit Award for best British producer and has produced albums for Kings of Leon, Laura Marling, Ryan Adams, Rufus Wainwright and Ray LaMontagne.