Imagist Blog

For the last month I’ve engaged in the process of going through and throwing away almost 4 decades of color and black & white negatives, transparencies, polaroid prints, layouts and key line mechanicals on illustration board, as well as final separation films for advertisements, catalog sheets, posters, and annual reports. Each of the thousands of color negatives had with it a note from the custom lab printer (complete with his or her name).

During this process of thinning the files I found myself reliving (or at least remembering) each photograph; each marker drawing during concept development; each meeting with the client; each run to: the lab to drop off exposed film and pickup the proofs and reproduction prints; the art supply stores for inks, pens, boards and cover sheets; the typesetting houses with layouts and copy all specced out in the margins; the professional photography stores for cases of sheet film (of the same emulsion number to insure color balance). It became very clear that I was a “job creator.” Our greater Milwaukee market supported 4 professional art supply stores, 3 large professional photo stores and half a dozen professional labs, numerous airbrush retouchers, typesetters and many hundreds of stripping light tables. These facilities employed thousands of people (basically doing highly skilled “hand work”).

Clearly these shifts in technology have done away with a whole lot of jobs. Some of them highly skilled — others, just as important, not so skilled. Every little advertisement we did in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s was touched by at least a half dozen people — from the person selling us the markers, pens and inks to the folks making and selling us the films and prints. By 1986 we began setting our own typography on our Macs though still requiring high resolution printouts by prepress departments and still requiring “pasteup” and “process camera” work and stripping. Though a couple years later it was all happening in the computer and we simply sent disks for printing out film ready to burn to plates. The typographers and strippers — gone — along with the manufacturers who made the typesetting and stripping materials and equipment.

The digital revolution in photography did away with the film, film manufacturers, Polaroid, local pro photo stores and labs; as well as the manufacturers of the professional lab equipment. Now it all happens on our desktops; including majority of our own retouching. We’re down to one art supply store. No reliable labs and one semi-professional photo store. And this is just the graphic arts industry.

For the last decade I’ve received several calls per month from “off shore” sources offering “design” services for $10 or less per hour. I watch ads on TV which offer “web site design” for “free.” In other words offering to do my job for far less than I can reasonably offer to do the same work. What was once highly skilled work requiring “local talent” has become a commodity of little value which can be done anywhere in the world at a small fraction of what we consider a “living wage.”

The off-shoring of jobs certainly plays a big role in the current unemployment rates — so also do the rapid changes in technologies — and our adoption of them — across all industries.