Priscilla Rattazzi is suspicious of change. She bought her first digital camera in 1998 and was excited by the instant results, but was disappointed by the quality of the images. Relieved, she wrongly assumed that digital technology would never become a real threat to film.
Today, she stares warily at her fresh-out-of-the-box Nikon, which has sat on a shelf for almost a year. Her agony with digital technology is the absence of a physical negative. She worries about her external hard drive. Will it fail, and, if so, when?
Rattazzi says, “The physical presence of my negatives and contact sheets dating back to 1974 is my equivalent of clutching a Linus blanket.” In the meantime, she has been playing with her I-phone, “a good way,” she says, “to postpone the moment when I will have to fully embrace digital technology.”
