I have 5 rolls of 35mm colour film that were exposed before the Leica M4-P was damaged by saltwater and sent back to the Leica factory in Germany to be repaired. That was in December 2022. It now increasingly looks increasingly likely that the rangefinder won't be repaired before I go walking in Japan in October.
3 of those 5 rolls were processed a while ago and I scanned them over the weekend. It's a slow process and whilst doing so I realised just how much I enjoyed the process of using an analogue Leica rangefinder to make a picture. I miss the analogue process as techne --- the working of materials by a craft person who knows effective ways to use the camera equipment to make good moves in the design space. This conception of the work of art as techne is quite different to the Romantic and modernist idea of creativity as a product of individual will, subjectivity, imagination.
The realization about techne was a kind of awakening or interruption to the flow or naturalised continuum of the myth making and the beautiful semblance of digital photography.
The interruption was not analogue nostalgia in a digital world, or a conservative romanticising of what has gone and been lost. I realized when I was scanning the negatives that I liked the look of film. Digital is a much superior technological but film, with all its limitations, has its own materiality and appearance. It is also much more unpredictable than digital. So technological progress is not linear. There is a discontinuity here. In this discontinuity or interruption the idea of techne emerges.