way, comparisons can be made, and even if there was nothing but black—black sheets framed all the way around the room in an exhibition—the blacks would be very different, the sizes would be very different, and they would be individualized by their titles. They need nothing more from me.
These prints do point to the history of photography, do point to a time period that is so far behind us, but we’re getting to see it. Some of it’s like finding dinosaur DNA. It shouldn’t be here. All of these old papers should’ve been thrown out a long, long time ago. That they have survived is incredible.
Howard Hopwood:
We are virtually the last man standing in the black-and-white paper market.
I’ve been with Ilford for 39 years. I’ve become chairman of Harman Technology. The company was established in 1879 by a gentleman called Alfred Harman, and he moved to a plant in Ilford, which was in the middle of the countryside in those days, in 1879, and hence the name of the company.
Well, the strategy of Ilford was quite clear in the late ’90s, particularly. The idea was that we would use the black-and-white photography business, which was profitable, and also was relatively stable. It had been declining since, I think, 1960, so we’d gotten used to the idea of it declining between 5 and 7 percent a year; that was what we expected, and all of our plans were built around that. Inkjet offered us the opportunity to get a growth dimension to the business, and so the idea was that we would grow inkjet as black and white declined, and then the two lines would cross; we would become an inkjet company with a small black-and-white business. It was all happiness. Unfortunately, around 2003, 2004, instead of black and white declining by 5 to 7 percent, it suddenly declined in the high 20s—25 to 27 percent—as the digital camera became easy to use, and people started to be happy with the results. So there was a big step change. And probably, the company could’ve withstood one year of that, but there was a second year, in 2004. And that meant that the growth in inkjet was not sufficient to outstrip the decline in the black and white. So the idea of gaining money from black and white to put into inkjet growth, the equation just didn’t work anymore. So at that point, the two parts of the business became separated during the receivership process, or Chapter 11, as you call it in the US. Myself plus five other ex-managers of the Ilford Group then bought the company out of receivership, and we established a company in February 2005, Harman Technology. We used Alfred Harman’s name when we bought the company. So we’re now just about five years old, and they said it wouldn’t last. But we saw the potential in the continuation of black and white. We’re just monochrome, black-and-white Ilford products, and we only have the Ilford brand for use with black-and-white photographic products.
When we got to the point of receivership, there were a sufficient number of people, particularly here in the UK, who had a strong belief that black and white was different. It wasn’t the case of digital or analog. It was a case of these people seeing that black and white in particular gave them something that digital didn’t. Anyone who sees a black-and-white picture, no matter who they are, is always astonished by how beautiful it is. One of the things that always drove us on was the fact that black and white gives you a very beautiful image, and it is not a recording of an event; it’s an interpretation of an event. I think that’s what made the difference to us. And so we believed that there would be a market for black and white for some time.
I remember when we bought the company…the next day, we managed to get a slot at the SPE conference [the Society for Photographic Education], in the US. I said, can I just have the first five minutes of your meeting, just to say what’s happened? So I announced that we’d bought the company, and it was going to carry on. And there were actually people crying in the audience, and you think, my goodness, I didn’t realize how important Ilford is to these people in education. They live and breathe it. When I came back, I said to the other directors, “I don’t think we realized that we weren’t just buying a business, we were actually buying a responsibility.” And I think we’ve tried to stick to that.
We just saw that there was an opportunity here. We thought it was wrong closing the business because we believed it was profitable, and it wasn’t until after we got here and sat down around this table and said, “So now what do we do? We’ve bought a business here, and yes we know it and love it, but now what do we do?”—we had thought through strategy beforehand, but it was very much in a cold way—that we realized it wasn’t like that. We had a responsibility.
Our commitment has always been to support the creative photographer. And that’s very important to us. And so we don’t just consider the black-and-white part of our business as a business—saying it’s actually a mission makes it sound too grand. But we do believe that there are people out there who, without us, would now not be able to do something that they love doing, and for us, that’s quite a major job.
It’s very interesting that since I got into marketing, which was around, I guess, the early ’80s, 1982, 1983, people have been asking me the question: How long do you think black and white is going to last? Every time, I would say, well, I think it’s safe for five years. Now, we’re going on 28 years, and I’m still giving the same answer, which is, I think we’ll be OK for another five years. So it’s a very difficult question.
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION IN PHOTOGRAPHY
THE INVENTION OF THE DIGITAL CAMERA
Steven Sasson
I worked at Eastman Kodak Company for over 35 years. I had the opportunity to design and build the first digital camera for consumer use, and that was in the early ’70s.
I was working in an applied research laboratory, and I had a supervisor whose name was Gareth Lloyd. I remember one day, he came to me and said that he had a small project that I might like to dabble in. It was looking at these new charge-coupled imaging devices [CCDs] that had just become available. And so I jumped at the chance, and our whole conversation probably lasted less than 30 seconds. He said, “Well, get one of these things, play around with it, and see what kind of imaging performance it may have.” So it was an almost nothing project. The gears started turning, and I said, well, if I’m going to do some imaging measurements, it would be helpful to capture an image, and then it would be nice if I put it in a camera form, so I could move around, take images of different things. And then I thought, well, if it’s all electronic, that would be really neat, because there’d be no moving parts in this camera, and I got excited about that idea, you know, being an electrical guy.
And so I adopted a completely digital approach, not because I had any great vision, I think; it was because I really didn’t know how to do it any other way. I had no idea, actually, how to build this, you understand, and because the project was really low key, basically, nobody knew we were working on it. I could fail a lot, and no one would really observe it. I had to go around and ask a lot of people about how I might do things, where I’d get parts. The camera that you see before you is all spare parts.
What worried me was the comparison to film, and the fact that you could reliably capture an image on film was a foregone conclusion. Nobody ever worried about losing an image when you captured it on film. It just didn’t happen. And so tape was by far the most reliable mechanism for storing digital data—and remember, this project involved both the creation of the camera that you see here, but also a playback unit, which was based on a microprocessor development system. Microprocessor chips had just started coming out. The only way to view a captured electronic image was by using a television set. The project took about a year and during that whole time the only way to see progress was through electronic measurements, never seeing an image until the entire system was complete.
There
