Thread

Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents

84 points · 64 comments · prismatic

Animats · 1790624236 · focus · HN ↗
Ah, yes, the 1970s, before the invention of color film.
1. browningstreet · 1790624359 · focus · HN ↗
  You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.
  B&W is also standard for street and art photography.
  You're gonna argue this _now_?
  "The past is stupid"
  1. anschwa · 1790624545 · focus · HN ↗
    You can develop color at home too, it's pretty much the same process and effort but with different chemicals.
    Animats · 1790625050 · focus · HN ↗
    Not for Kodachrome, which was good but is dead due to the complexity of processing.
    abcd_f · 1790626117 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't know if they were Kodachrome, but I still have some color Kodak slides that my dad developed at home in the late 80s.
    jcynix · 1790632613 · focus · HN ↗
    Definitely not Kodachrome. The process to use at home was Kodak's Ektachrome. Still much more work than the much simpler b&w processing.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ektachrome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ektachrome
    abcd_f · 1790686427 · focus · HN ↗
    Must've been that. Will check if there are any markings on slides. I do remember the process being rather involved.
  2. kurthr · 1790625698 · focus · HN ↗
    Color Polaroids came out in the mid 60s. Color SX-70s were commonplace in the 70s.
    GuinansEyebrows · 1790625916 · focus · HN ↗
    i love instant cameras but they aren't really used for professional photography except as a novelty or as a specific artistic choice, and sx-70 isn't a particularly stable medium.
    kurthr · 1790632432 · focus · HN ↗
    Professionals aren't developing at home unless they have a darkroom, which were fully capable of doing color negatives in the 1970s. If you can shove color into a self-developing mobile consumer device, a professional can have it done.
    Somehow this needs to be about poor constrained do-it-yourself professionals?
    You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.
    The consumer "street" photography of the time was mostly Polaroids, or little tiny box cameras you had developed at a booth.
    This has all to do with a feel, and It could be that it was mostly shot in color and converted to B&W. Or, the wonderful dynamic range of B&W could be the reason. That's fine, but it has nothing to do with lack of choice.
2. blacksqr · 1790625510 · focus · HN ↗
  Long-term-stable color photo processing didn't become widely available until the late 1970s-early 1980s.
  So if you were an artist and interested in building and maintaining a permanent portfolio, B&W was pretty much your only option.
  1. echelon · 1790631872 · focus · HN ↗
    Not to mention it looks timeless.
    These people don't look ancient to me. They look like you could reach out and touch them, converse with them, share the story of their lives.
3. the__alchemist · 1790626705 · focus · HN ↗
  Could you please elaborate your thought process here? For example, are you claiming the author was using obsolete tech for one reason or another? Or making a pretentious artistic choice? Or do you think these were taken in an earlier period, then misatributed as being from the 1970s?
4. jamesgill · 1790627055 · focus · HN ↗
  In the 1970s color film/development/print cost significantly more than black and white.
  Shooting in b&w was common, because it was much cheaper. But of course, he could've chosen it or aesthetic reasons.
  1. rafram · 1790627587 · focus · HN ↗
    Interestingly, it's the opposite now - B&W tends to be more expensive because it has to be done by hand at most shops, while color development is done by machine.

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