By Tess Carenbauer

For Neal Rantoul, it’s time for change.

Every year since 1971, he has taught photography at Northeastern, where he is in charge of the program. He also designed the school’s analog lab, built in 1987.

Like most of today’s veteran photographers, Rantoul got his start working with analog cameras and film. But now, nearly 21 years after the lab’s construction was completed, Rantoul has very different plans for the space – to shrink the lab and, eventually, to get rid of it.

“We’re an analog space in a digital world,” he said.

Since 2003, he has strongly supported plans for a new lab, when he said he realized Northeastern was lagging in terms of processing technologies.

Once the department raises the appropriate funds, he said, the lab, will go digital. The pending change has left faculty and staff feeling ambitious, and some students, ambivalent.

Recently, other schools around the country began to make the jump from analog to digital. Rantoul said his thoughts for a new lab at Northeastern made a significant jump, too. The new lab didn’t just seem practical anymore; it seemed a necessary change.

Built from Rantoul’s design, the photography lab provides students and community members with 29 individual darkrooms and enlargers, a black-and-white print processor and all the chemicals needed to develop and handmake prints from black-and-white film.

According to the lab’s website, it also has available 20 Nikon Digital SLR cameras, four Epson 3200 scanners and six Epson printers.

The lab hasn’t required any renovations until now, Rantoul said, and posed no real problems until recently, when students and faculty began to lack sufficient space for computers that handle the processes of digital photography.

“There are not enough computers to sustain a class,” said Ed Andrews, acting chair of Northeastern’s art + design program.

Andrews noticed the need for change around the same time as Rantoul, when the department started moving computers into the lab to make room for students and space, he said.

As it’s digitalized, the lab will join others around the world, and even Polaroid, a company that has risen to international acclaim since the 1970s, when its iconic instant photographs were introduced to the public. Recently, according to media reports, Polaroid announced that it has stopped making its instant film, and expects leftovers to run out in about a year.

With finished structural plans for a new digital space, and the chair’s approval, the photography department only needs funding.

“It’s difficult to say exactly how much a new digital lab would cost at such an early stage in the project because there are so many variables,” said Bruce Ronkin, senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Money could come from university funds, gifts to the university or both, Ronkin said.

However, Rantoul said he estimates the costs for demolition and reconstruction will be between $750,000 and $1 million.

It was a stretch for the department to buy even a $1,000 laser printer last year, he said.

Although Andrews and Rantoul are ready to create a new lab, they said, some students are hesitant.

Molly Ryan, a senior nursing major, said she couldn’t see herself taking Photography 1 if it didn’t mean working with analog.

“That’s the part that intrigues me,” said Ashley McElroy, another senior nursing major.

McElroy said she believes she could teach herself digital processing, but not how to handle film.

Other students agree that film processing should be taught in classes, even as it’s being replaced worldwide with digital technology.

“Manual art is something that requires you to start from the basics,” said Marc Pellegrino, a middler music major.

A friend – Clara Rice, a middler photography major – recently started to teach Pellegrino how to develop his film in the lab, and make his own black-and-white prints using the proper chemicals.

“You can’t master one [form] without a basic understanding of the other,” he said, while waiting in the photo lab to see how a print turned out.

Like Ryan and McElroy, Pellegrino said students need teachers to introduce both analog – a relic of art and science – and digital processing.

Though Rantoul said he doesn’t think it’s the school’s responsibility to teach both, he left a little physical space for an analog lab in his blueprint for the new lab. The new design will make space for a digital area, a studio shooting space and an analog lab smaller than the current one.

The expansion of digital resources will also expand opportunities for art students, Rantoul said. There are plans for a new bachelor of fine arts degree in digital art, and an “alternative processes” course in which students will still be able to learn both processes.

Rantoul said film is becoming impractical. As manufacturers create less analog equipment, and the demand for analog skills in the workforce decreases, film is less accessible and less necessary.

A large part of the issue with using analog in certain professions today is how relatively time consuming the process has become, said Ted Gartland, the photo assignment editor at The Globe.

“If you’re at the Maine caucus and you’re shooting with film, when you take that film somewhere else to develop it, there’s someone in the corner of the room you just left … with his laptop, sending me his photos [digitally],” he said. “And those are the photos that will go in the paper.”

But being impractical doesn’t have to lead to extinction, Gartland said. He said he believes analog photography is still a legitimate art form.

“When film came along, they didn’t stop selling canvases and paint. When color film came along, they didn’t stop selling black-and-white. It’s still valid, just not necessarily economically feasible,” he said.

Two years ago, The Globe did away with its own analog lab – an economic and technical decision, Gartland said, like Northeastern’s choice to do the same.

Andrews also sees the presence of film diminishing, he said. Not only is it harder to find, he said, but film has become more expensive.

Students like Pellegrino said they will lose an understanding of a classic art form, and a once revolutionary scientific process, because of the department’s plans to rebuild the lab.

“They feel like if they go to digital they’ll lose their talent,” Rantoul said. But in his decades of experience, he said he has seen new students transition succesfully from film to digital.

Photography 1 students usually prefer to do their final projects digitally, he said. And once students go digital, he said, they hardly ever go back to film.

In the future, even after the lab is transformed, faculty and students may continue to disagree about the cultural significance and practicality of the analog process. But Andrews said both parties might be failing to see what really matters in photography.

“People