Emotional Film Captures Photographers’ Reactions to the End of Slide Film Processing

Photography News

February 28, 2014, may be just another date for most of us, but for the clients of Orms’s E6 processing unit, the day is going to be forever etched in their memories—and for all the wrong reasons. The processing unit, which processed slide film, closed their shutters. They processed their last slide film on that day. The following is an emotional film shot by AV Hero that captures the emotions of some of its clients and the employees who worked there:

Koos Van Der Lende, a landscape photographer and a client of E6, expresses his shock and dismay,

“When I arrived here and I saw the empty space at the E6 apartment, no hangers on the racks, I asked Jerome, what’s happening? Are you moving? No. he says, actually bad news, we are closing down. It was really like getting cold water over myself, because this was actually my last place to process.”

Is this the end of the road for slide film?

To summarize what a technician felt about the closing down of an era, Andre Eksteen, an E6 technician at Orms said,

“Film is something very unique way. Photographers had to—with a lot of knowledge and experience—expose the film, and there was a lot of trust that had to be put between the lab and the photographer, as such, and that is a moment that we are saying goodbye to. Nevermind just the process itself.”

“The Last Shot”

For a majority of photographers in Cape Town, South Africa, shooting slide film in itself is a challenge, because the film has to be imported. Now that Orms has closed down their slide film processing lab, photographers have to look for other options to process their film, move to shooting in other types of film, or shift to digital altogether.