Predictions

"I FEEL THAT the camera finds its main importance as a recording and communicating mechanism, and I should like to see it develop until it takes its place with the pencil and the typewriter as an instrument of our everyday language. Photography should be taught in the schools along with penmanship as part of postwar education's expansion.

"It is possible to perfect the camera to the point where it will become an automatic instrument which will focus, expose and process the film by the mere push of a button. In this way we will be able to realize a medium possessing an immediacy between seeing and recording unachieved by any other art.

"I would like to see the camera and photographic material so refined that we need never use anything larger than a miniature camera exposing single frames of 16 mm film. For this we need grainless film with dyes rather than silver particles as the sensitive medium. The camera should have a built-in lens turret, mounting a wide angle, normal and telephoto lens, a photoelectrically controlled lens diaphragm and an automatic dry processing chamber. A camera of this sort could be easily carried about along with a plentiful supply of film. You wouldn't have to wait for results. And it would never need intrude itself upon the scene being photographed, leaving reality unchanged. There should be color film with greater latitude and speed and controlled brilliance, as well as the black-and-white which will do for most purposes.

"This extreme simplification will bring photography to everybody. It will leave the photographer free to develop his creative and esthetic principles. And art, if it is to come from photography, will come out of the meaning of the photograph and the greatness of the observation of the photographer."

Written by Eliot Elisofon... in 1944!