Oyster Bay High School photography students recently stepped back in time and got the chance to learn how to take photos using old-school film cameras. Through a collaboration with Adorama, a Manhattan-based camera and electronics retailer, students in the school’s photography classes are learning the art and science of film photography, from loading a roll of film to developing prints by hand.
The partnership began when Keith McCord, who works in marketing at Adorama and went to Walt Whitman High School, in Huntington Station, with Erica Giglio Pac, the school district’s director of fine, performing and media arts, contacted her with an idea.
Adorama has long emphasized education as part of its mission. “We sell photography and video equipment, but years ago, when I started with them, one of my key objectives was to bring more education into the company,” Daniel Norton, an educator and photographer with Adorama, said. “I wanted to help people create better images, and not just try to sell stuff to them.”
Giglio Pac saw an opportunity to expand the photography program at the high school. “We have a very rich photography curriculum,” she said. “We have a Photography 1 and a Photography 2 class, probably some of our most popular classes in our course catalog in terms of media art.”
The idea was to introduce students, who primarily work with digital cameras, to film photography. For many it was their first exposure to a medium that predates the instant feedback of digital screens.
“If you show them a roll of film, which we did, they didn’t even know what it was,” Giglio Pac said. “They had never seen it. It was like a real relic to them. It was like showing my son a rotary phone.”
Norton admitted initially assuming that students would at least recognize film. “It didn’t even occur to me they wouldn’t even know what film was,” he said. “A lot of them don’t. They have an idea, but they’ve never touched it. They’ve never seen it.”
During the first session on Jan. 30, Norton demonstrated how to load a camera and explained the fundamentals of shooting photos without being able to see the image immediately afterward.
Students were then given cameras to use on their own for a week, and directed to shoot an entire roll of film before returning for the development process.
“There’s something amazing about the tangibility of the photography,” Norton said. “When you make that picture … you can see there’s nothing on the back of the camera, right? Put a smiley face on the back of the camera. That’s it. You look at yourself like that’s what you’re looking at.”
For Giglio Pac, the project is about more than nostalgia. It’s about understanding artistic lineage.
“You can’t appreciate what you have until you know what came before you, right?” she said. “To me, it’s very important to know what came before you, because it informs what’s happening today and what will happen in the future.”
She also emphasized the reflective aspect of the assignment. Norton encouraged students to keep journals detailing how they prepared for each shot, including lighting, focus and distance.
“As an artist, to actually take the time to write and think about your process, I think, is extremely powerful,” Giglio Pac said.
For students, the experience has been both challenging and freeing. Madison Morley, a senior, said she enrolled in both photography and AP art this year, and added that it was interesting to talk about the cameras with her mother, who remembered using them before the rise of digital cameras.
She actually enjoyed not being able to immediately review her shots, Morley said. “I kind of liked not seeing the picture afterwards,” she said. “Maybe I should just like learn to trust myself.”
Sophomore Fernanda Fuentealba said she had some previous experience with film cameras with her family, but the hands-on instruction made a difference. She agreed that not seeing immediate results was surprisingly gratifying.
“I honestly really like turning the film,” Fuentealba said.
Both students spent their week photographing friends and everyday moments. Morley took pictures at a friend’s birthday party, and experimented with movement shots and images of the moon. Fuentealba posed friends in front of mirrors and photographed objects around her.
In the second phase of the project, the students were scheduled to develop the film on Friday in a makeshift darkroom created in the school theater. Without a permanent darkroom, school and Adorama staff planned to block out all light between the stage curtains to allow students to process their film by hand.
The finished prints will be displayed in a special gallery at the high school’s annual art show in May, complete with an explanation of the master class and what students learned.
For Morley and Fuentealba, the experience has already broadened their perspective. “It definitely really opened my world view of, like, oh, that everything must be exactly, like, perfect,” Morley said.
Fuentealba was eager for the next session. “I’m really curious to see how [the photos] look in the darkroom,” she said. “I feel like it’ll be cool to experience that, and know what that’s really like.’”
