In praise of grain

For two years I tried to get rid of it. Finer stock, slower film, a tripod I resented carrying. Then a lab technician pointed out that every picture I had pinned above the desk was grainy, and that I had been solving a problem nobody else could see.

Grain is not noise. Noise is something added by the apparatus against your wishes. Grain is the apparatus itself — the silver that happened to be in the path of the light. Removing it does not clean the picture up, it removes the evidence that anything was recorded at all.

There is a practical argument too. Pushed two stops, HP5 gives you a texture that holds a picture together when the light does not. Flat grey afternoons, which is most afternoons here, come out as something with a surface rather than a smear.

I am not arguing for deliberate degradation. A badly scanned negative is just badly scanned. But the instinct to smooth everything until it resembles a rendering is worth resisting.