Photo is dead, long live photo

Argue all you want fellow photo students, but the sad truth is that Chabot College's photography department is obsolete. The days when professional and amateur shooters developed negatives and printed photos in darkrooms are vanishing rapidly, replaced by digital capture, Adobe PhotoShop, and inkjet printers. It is the sad truth that the world is spiraling upward to embrace technology while discarding the values of traditional technique, and Chabot must rise to that same call. This is bad news on the college's part, especially with ever increasing talk about expanding the digital outlook in Chabot's photo curriculum. For those who dissent from the traditional values of fixer and darkroom developer, I issue a challenge: protest the outrage and issue a declaration of change. But that is only one step, for the college must do away with the wet labs and surrender the overall quality of the program in order to catch up on the times. In order to achieve this, we must abolish all film Photo 50 courses and replace them with digital variants. Should any instructor object, the college administration must dismiss them immediately and blacklist them as Senator Joseph McCarthy did to actors during the anti-Communist scare of the 1950s. In ensuring that digital Photo 50 courses are in place, students are welcome to learn a cruder way of taking photos, all the while deleting the photos they don't like. After all, why should the students bother to think on composition and light values, or critically evaluate their work when they could just take that good photo and call it a day? And to think of the time saved developing film, forsaking knowing the nuances of pushing and pulling film, and of exposure. Rip out the darkrooms and replace them with expensive digital labs, where students can work like mindless drones to grayscale their images and proceed to work on dodging and burning with the use of a mouse. It would be a waste of time teaching them photographic traditional values, when they could auto-crop and auto-level their entire work. All one needs to do is send the image to the inkjet printer and wait, instead of using developer and fixer and time-honored patience. Ditto for the color classes as well. As for those students who cannot move with the flow, they should be persuaded to join the modern era. If they cannot give in, then line 'em up in front of a firing squad because they might as well be dead, as their future is ensured to end in despair. The days of such masters as Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa are over, replaced by the digital photographer and his or her ability to shoot countless images and not worry about quality. The future beckons, so leave the past in the dumpster bin. There is no need for quality images and training there, just the best way to mass-produce images.