Iowa museum hosts film-based photography exhibit

Blanden Memorial Art Museum Director Eric Anderson says film photography demands more investment in the film itself (with a limited number of frames per roll) and more patience than digital photography. (Image Courtesy: The Fort Dodge Messenger).

The Blanden Memorial Art Museum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, will host the “Analog It” juried film-based photography exhibit from January 4 until May 7, according to The Fort Dodge Messenger. The Fort Dodge/Kosovo Art Initiative, an international exchange between Fort Dodge and Iowa’s sister state, the Republic of Kosovo, is running the exhibit, with submissions received from fifteen photographers at anywhere from two to five images apiece. Hans Madsen, a reporter as well aa photographer for The Messenger, saw four of his five submissions selected, and says it doesn’t matter what kind of camera a photographer uses when shooting on film.

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Inside the “Forgotten Film” online community

Hobbyists are buying strangers’ used film rolls on eBay (which guarantees an easy profit for the sellers who buy them for cheap or find them for nothing at all) and undertaking the expensive, treacherous task of developing sometimes degraded prints, according to The Guardian. The “Forgotten Film” subreddit has grown from eight hundred Redditors to three thousand over the last three years, perhaps in response to the 2017 “mystery box” craze, with popular YouTubers unboxing collections of unknown and random items from eBay. Levi Bettwieser, an Idahoan video producer, runs the nonprofit Rescued Film Project, where people can give him their old films to develop, and as for the voyeuristic thrill of being the first to see an image out of the past, Bettwieser says, “Pictures are our defense against time.”