An Essay By David J. LaBella

    They have lived in our imagination for so long that, if one takes a moment to consider them and stands still with eyes half closed and allows the mind to roam free, almost everyone can picture them roaming over some primitive, primordial landscape—occasionally in small groups but more often singly, moving slowly and deliberately from one location to another, silent, pausing from time to time to take in their surroundings. Their odd and outlandish appearance and lumbering gait belies the keen instincts that have kept them alive through the long years and makes them seem to us, separated from them by our sophisticated modern trappings and by the long evolution that has served to establish our dominion over our world, dim-witted and unlovely. Even now, we wonder if they may have been capable of understanding the inevitability of the march of progress; if, as they trod the forests and plains of places long since brought under the yoke of human industry and agriculture, they might have had some vague premonition of the doom that lay in wait for them all. Indeed, it seems now that we know of them only by the antiquated relics and remains they have left behind; curiosities better left to the endless bone yard that is history. Do I speak of dinosaurs? Not exactly, for I am one: they are large-format film photographers—walking anachronisms untouched by automatic and digital technology; slowly grinding out images one by one on sheet film. A proud but somewhat stubborn lot, given to a certain stodgy satisfaction about their art; carrying on a tradition that reaches back over 150 years. There are even a few who still produce contact prints on glass plates, refusing even the relative convenience of film. The common thread that binds them together in their method is the care, discipline and precision they bring to their art, and their appreciation for the history to which they belong —as honorable an artistic tradition as any.