Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Mali, Bangladesh and West Bank.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

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Photos from Syria, Mali, Bangladesh and West Bank.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

Picturing the End of Analog

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I grew up in the Bronx, but I’ve never had any dewy-eyed nostalgia for the days of stickball and egg creams. My early life on the urban mainland in the 1960s was marked by rapid, hectic and at times heartbreaking change and loss.

But ask me about film, and my head gts light and my heart races. Had it not been for all those bulk-loaded rolls of Tri-X I tore through in the 1970s, I would have few memories of what had been the landscape of my youth.

Those same emotions â€" of joy, confusion, excitement and, yes, loss â€" are vividly evoked by Robert Burley’s book “The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era.” In it, he chronicles the breakneck speed at which film and the huge factories where it was produced have almost vanished. He has pulled back the curtains and taken the viewer into places where film, paper and chemicals were cloaked in darkness â€" both literal and legal. Using a 4-by-5 film camera whose technology itself harkens to the 19th century, he has produced a meditative and loving look at an industry that has imploded like the dozens of factories that have vanished into rubble and emp! ty lots.

Suddenly, the sight of a deserted factory, a shuttered portrait studio or even the plain black door to a coating room stirs up something beyond nostalgia.

Robert Burley Former Toronto Film Studios, proposed site of a new Walmart, Toronto, 2011.

“The whole transition has happened so quickly,” said Mr. Burley, who lives in Toronto. “Every year more products are discontinued. As a 55-year-old photographer who worked with film my whole life, I find my whole brain being rewired. I’m looking at things differently than I did, even when I started this project.”

The project began in 2005, when he learned that Kodak Canada â€" which he noted produced all the blck-and-white film for North America â€" was going to close. His first thought was whether someone would photograph that moment. Relying on contacts there â€" culled from years working with the company on a lecture series â€" he gained entry to places that by definition had to control access as they manufactured film that, in the case of color, required more than a dozen layers of hair-thin emulsion.

“If you worked at Kodak Canada and had a cold, you couldn’t work in certain parts of the production area because they worried it would spread to the organic materials they used, though that might be a myth,” Mr. Burley said. “They do have very strict protocols about how these facilities work. These are buildings that are large with complex machines running all the time. It’s not like they can shut down the line for a few minutes. It takes a day or two to actually gear down.”

Mr. Burley had less luck with Kodak in Rochester, although he was allowed to photograph several factory imp! losions t! here. Agfa and Ilford were more accommodating, up to a point.

“They would let me through 6 of the 10 doors,” he said. “But once I got to No. 7, they said, ‘No, you can’t go in there.’ They don’t want their competitors to see how they’re doing things. It is still a world of secret recipes.”

The industry’s immense scale was what made it hugely profitable â€" and competitive. Consider that master rolls of film â€" from which consumer-size rolls are cut â€" are 50 inches wide and two miles long. Imagine a warehouse full of them. Now, what kind of market survives for that

Robert Burley Paper finishing building, Ilford, Mobberley, England, 2010.

For color, the answer is in the movies, which buys billions of feet of film each year. Butthe camera makers have announced that they will no longer make film cameras, and theaters have been steadily switching to digital projection, too.

“Once that demand is gone, it’s going to be more difficult to find,” Mr. Burley said.

With its very specific â€" and in the case of color, unforgiving â€" tolerances, film is not something you can produce artisanally, like some cheese in a Williamsburg basement. But black-and-white, especially among fine art photographers, Mr. Burley said, can have a small-scale future, because it is a simpler process that requires only one light-sensitive layer.

“I looked at the Ilford company and thought, they can do this,” he said. “They have 250 employees and they’re making batches of film and paper for two or three days, warehouse it, sell it off and make more. Everything is slower there. They coat at 60 meters a minute, not 300.”

The analog process itself had a certain slow, deliberate â€" even delicate â€" quality. Years afte! r he emba! rked on his project, Mr. Burley said his way of looking at prints by those photographers he admired in his younger days had changed. They seem small and start to feel like lithographs or engravings, he said.

“We can’t help but have an emotional attachment to physical things,” he said. “I haven’t figured that out with digital. I spend so much time managing data now. It’s a completely awful job. You don’t actually get to engage with the pictures along the way. The wonderful thing about an archive was going through it and finding new things and saying, ‘Gee, isn’t that a lovely picture I made.’ Now, we’re just looking at codes.”

But he, too, is shooting digital, even as he introduces his students at Ryerson University to film and the rituals of the darkroom.

“They are doing wonderful things with it,” Mr. Burley said. “A lot of the interesting things they do is create this hybrid world between analog and digital. They creae things in the darkroom, which they then scan. They’re thinking about it a whole new way, and it’s really fascinating to watch.”

Robert Burley Administrative Area, Building 7, Kodak Canada, Toronto, 2006.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Follow Lens on Facebook.

Picturing the End of Analog

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

I grew up in the Bronx, but I’ve never had any dewy-eyed nostalgia for the days of stickball and egg creams. My early life on the urban mainland in the 1960s was marked by rapid, hectic and at times heartbreaking change and loss.

But ask me about film, and my head gts light and my heart races. Had it not been for all those bulk-loaded rolls of Tri-X I tore through in the 1970s, I would have few memories of what had been the landscape of my youth.

Those same emotions â€" of joy, confusion, excitement and, yes, loss â€" are vividly evoked by Robert Burley’s book “The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era.” In it, he chronicles the breakneck speed at which film and the huge factories where it was produced have almost vanished. He has pulled back the curtains and taken the viewer into places where film, paper and chemicals were cloaked in darkness â€" both literal and legal. Using a 4-by-5 film camera whose technology itself harkens to the 19th century, he has produced a meditative and loving look at an industry that has imploded like the dozens of factories that have vanished into rubble and emp! ty lots.

Suddenly, the sight of a deserted factory, a shuttered portrait studio or even the plain black door to a coating room stirs up something beyond nostalgia.

Robert Burley Former Toronto Film Studios, proposed site of a new Walmart, Toronto, 2011.

“The whole transition has happened so quickly,” said Mr. Burley, who lives in Toronto. “Every year more products are discontinued. As a 55-year-old photographer who worked with film my whole life, I find my whole brain being rewired. I’m looking at things differently than I did, even when I started this project.”

The project began in 2005, when he learned that Kodak Canada â€" which he noted produced all the blck-and-white film for North America â€" was going to close. His first thought was whether someone would photograph that moment. Relying on contacts there â€" culled from years working with the company on a lecture series â€" he gained entry to places that by definition had to control access as they manufactured film that, in the case of color, required more than a dozen layers of hair-thin emulsion.

“If you worked at Kodak Canada and had a cold, you couldn’t work in certain parts of the production area because they worried it would spread to the organic materials they used, though that might be a myth,” Mr. Burley said. “They do have very strict protocols about how these facilities work. These are buildings that are large with complex machines running all the time. It’s not like they can shut down the line for a few minutes. It takes a day or two to actually gear down.”

Mr. Burley had less luck with Kodak in Rochester, although he was allowed to photograph several factory imp! losions t! here. Agfa and Ilford were more accommodating, up to a point.

“They would let me through 6 of the 10 doors,” he said. “But once I got to No. 7, they said, ‘No, you can’t go in there.’ They don’t want their competitors to see how they’re doing things. It is still a world of secret recipes.”

The industry’s immense scale was what made it hugely profitable â€" and competitive. Consider that master rolls of film â€" from which consumer-size rolls are cut â€" are 50 inches wide and two miles long. Imagine a warehouse full of them. Now, what kind of market survives for that

Robert Burley Paper finishing building, Ilford, Mobberley, England, 2010.

For color, the answer is in the movies, which buys billions of feet of film each year. Butthe camera makers have announced that they will no longer make film cameras, and theaters have been steadily switching to digital projection, too.

“Once that demand is gone, it’s going to be more difficult to find,” Mr. Burley said.

With its very specific â€" and in the case of color, unforgiving â€" tolerances, film is not something you can produce artisanally, like some cheese in a Williamsburg basement. But black-and-white, especially among fine art photographers, Mr. Burley said, can have a small-scale future, because it is a simpler process that requires only one light-sensitive layer.

“I looked at the Ilford company and thought, they can do this,” he said. “They have 250 employees and they’re making batches of film and paper for two or three days, warehouse it, sell it off and make more. Everything is slower there. They coat at 60 meters a minute, not 300.”

The analog process itself had a certain slow, deliberate â€" even delicate â€" quality. Years afte! r he emba! rked on his project, Mr. Burley said his way of looking at prints by those photographers he admired in his younger days had changed. They seem small and start to feel like lithographs or engravings, he said.

“We can’t help but have an emotional attachment to physical things,” he said. “I haven’t figured that out with digital. I spend so much time managing data now. It’s a completely awful job. You don’t actually get to engage with the pictures along the way. The wonderful thing about an archive was going through it and finding new things and saying, ‘Gee, isn’t that a lovely picture I made.’ Now, we’re just looking at codes.”

But he, too, is shooting digital, even as he introduces his students at Ryerson University to film and the rituals of the darkroom.

“They are doing wonderful things with it,” Mr. Burley said. “A lot of the interesting things they do is create this hybrid world between analog and digital. They creae things in the darkroom, which they then scan. They’re thinking about it a whole new way, and it’s really fascinating to watch.”

Robert Burley Administrative Area, Building 7, Kodak Canada, Toronto, 2006.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Follow Lens on Facebook.