With just about everyone these days equipped with a digital camera in their pocket or purse, the idea of analog film photography has quickly become something of a rarefied art. It’s a radical shift that has meant not only the demise of high-school darkrooms and street-corner processing labs, but also a reshaping of the photo industry itself, with once-giants such as Kodak, Polaroid, Ilford and Agfa shuttering manufacturing plants and development facilities—a phenomenon that not so long ago would have seemed impossible to imagine.
Veteran Toronto photographer Robert Burley has tracked this destruction in The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era, a new book of photos shot (on film, with large-format cameras) at the abandoned spaces and demolition sites of various photo-industry plants around the world. To view a selection of images from the book, please click on the Photos icon above.
