A Tri-X Experiment

I recently happened across the project “Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66” by the late Edward Keating. Keating worked on the project between 2000 and 2011 and published a book with Damiani in 2018. Keating in the book talks about traveling west on Route 66 in 1977 as a young alcoholic searching for direction. It was on that trip that he finally decided to get sober. Keating returned in 2000 and described being on the road as “[seeing] devastation everywhere…Rote 66 was now little more than a catch drain for those who couldn’t keep up, its blacktop crumbling along with its people.” The photo project is not your typical collection of Route 66 images such as old motels and neon signs with a sense of nostalgia for a supposed better time somewhere in the mid-century. This project is a gritty, honest look at the people and places on Route 66. There’s no nostalgia here. Of everything ever done on Route 66, this may be the best and most honest look at the famed Mother Road (except perhaps for Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in which the term “Mother Road” was coined).

Edward Keating

Amarillo, TX (Working Girl in the Cattleman Cafe) - 2000

One of the aspects of the work that gives it that raw edge is the fact it was all shot on 35mm black and white film (likely Kodak Tri-X). The images are grainy, sometimes there’s some camera shake, or something’s not quite in focus, and a loss of acute details. All these aspects, in my opinion, remove some of the reality from the images. You know what you’re looking at is real, but with the lack of life-like clarity the images have a bit of feeling as being surreal. Maybe this wasn’t reality, just a bad dream.

In my photography I’ve always tended towards the opposite, very clean photos with a lot of detail. I moved on from 35mm to medium format pretty early in my “serious” photography, and eventually on to 4x5 and high resolution digital. But I’ve always had a soft spot for that gritty, grainy, and more loosely composed photography of legends like Robert Frank, Larry Towell, and Todd Webb, even if it was never really my style. After coming across Keating’s work recently it made me think maybe I should experiment with this medium, it’s been over 20 years since I shot a roll of Tri-X.

I put in an order for some Tri-X and dug out my old Canon AE-1 and Nikon FE2 that haven’t done anything but hold down a shelf for well over a decade, cleaned everything, and ordered some new batteries. My thinking was one body could shoot at box speed and the other could be pushed a few stops for low light situations. I’ve been carrying around these cameras for about a month using them almost exclusively. I’ve finally gotten around to developing the rolls and scanning the film.

The experiment has been a mixed result for me. I definitely enjoy the grain and loosening up in my style a lot. But it also reminds me of just how challenging it is to work with 35mm film (which makes the work of someone like Keating all the more impressive). You’re stuck with whatever the film speed is you have in the camera (unless you want to take on the challenge of removing and later reusing a partial roll), focusing is hard in low light, and you never really know if it’s going to work out the way you envisioned it. Sometimes that’s OK. The first image on this post at Carrington, ND, has two strange arcs on the right side of the image, which was the result of the film jamming on the developing spool when I was loading it and creating a crease in the film. I like the way it worked out on this image (and you’d never create that digitally), but on a different image it may have been unusable.

The main goal of this experiment was just to do something different for a while. Sometimes we get so locked into our own style it becomes somewhat boring. This allowed me to change things up a little bit and work within the constraints of the film and cameras to make something work. The jury’s still out on how much more 35mm film I’ll continue to shoot in the future, but this has certainly been a needed break from what I usually do.

And it sure is hard to beat that grainy Tri-X look!

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