A generation accustomed to having multiple tools and information available instantly and unlimitedly is precisely the one that is putting back on the table the charm of those objects that invite precisely the opposite and that, consequently, require a process. The interest and use of analogue cameras – the old-fashioned film ones – is becoming more and more frequent, on the part of those people whose childhood images are printed today thanks to them. “We take a lot of photos that last as long as it takes us to change phones. However, almost all of us keep albums from when we were little that are memories of our lives, places to return to and revisit,” say Cristóbal Benavente and Marta Arquero, managers of the store. Silver Saltswhich is already a mandatory stop for lovers of this type of photography.
Indeed, today events and social gatherings are once again materialized forever thanks to the chemical process of this type of photography. At festivals we are beginning to see people putting away their cell phones and taking out a disposable camera instead. One returns to the restlessness of the day of development to encounter the final result and preserve it as a treasure. In short, photography is valued as synonymous with beauty, melancholy and memory. Furthermore, by offering a limited service, since the reel is not infinite, what is important and what you want to keep is chosen with greater precision, which is why you have an emotional bond with the person who takes the photo, something that with the use of the smartphones It has been lost for a large part of the population. “Currently, we have images of absolutely everything we do and experience, whether it has value or not. Now, the photos of your wedding are interspersed with the image of the toast with tomato that you had for breakfast the week before,” reflects Clara Sanz, Social Media Strategist at the creative agency It’s happening.
Restructuring priorities
Typically, after taking a selfie or asking for a photo for a potential post For social networks, a scrutiny of all the supposed defects of the face and body is carried out in an almost obsessive way. This image is studied from all angles and, on some occasions, editing and well-known filters are used, modifying the people who appear in it beyond recognition. So much so that, according to a UOC article (Open University of Catalonia), the Boston Medical Center talks about “selfie dysmorphia,” referring to the disorder suffered by those who undergo plastic surgery in order to look like themselves when social media filters are applied.
In response to this reality, alternative social networks were created such as BeReal, which was born in 2020 to fight against this lack of reality and the complexes that derive from Instagram and other applications, offering a less artificial option especially welcomed by Generation Z, which has shown a clear concern for mental health. However, this does not offer an effective solution either since, as Clara Sanz indicates, “from the moment you can choose the moment to take the photo and you can repeat the image, it loses a bit of its meaning.”
However, what happens when you look at analog photographs is the opposite: they tend to please you even though they may not be perfect, or even though the people who appear in them are not completely favored; They like them because they are the memory of a certain moment and what it felt like then, as well as a window to understand how others look: “Analog photography is authenticity and reality. It’s seeing your birthday photos around a cake and there being a stain on the tablecloth; It is having chocolate on your cheek and remembering how much fun you had at those parties,” says Clara Sanz.
Precisely these imperfections are what, possibly, millennials They miss it so much, and many other young people from Generation Z long for not even having lived through it. Indeed, it can be thought that the rise of analog cameras arises as a response to the need for naturalness lost after so many years of feigned perfection, to once again use photography as a means of expression and as a tool to materialize memories. In the case of disposable cameras, there is also the added attraction of not knowing what the result will be like until the moment of development, which for many young people is a totally different experience from what they are used to.
The growing interest on the part of these sectors of the population is easily identified: those responsible for Sales de Plata, which has no more or less than 23,000 followers, explain that they receive a lot of questions every day regarding the management and characteristics of cameras since many people who are curious about the subject have never had contact with it before, not even in childhood: “The curious thing is that the question is very common among older people: but does this still exist? There is a great difference in perspective according to age regarding analog photography: those who see it as a creative medium full of possibilities and those who experienced its decline in the early 2000s, sold all their equipment and feel that it is a medium. obsolete”, confirm Cristóbal Benavente and Marta Arquero.
Nostalgia without filters
There are countless photo editing tools that make that look easier. vintage that so much has been tried to achieve. This fixation, in fact, comes from afar. Many young adults now remember those teenage years when they spent hours in front of the computer screen visiting Tumblr accounts where this aesthetic reigned. It was quite common to want to live inside the video clips of video games either Summertime Sadness, of Lana del Rey, who were wrapped in the romanticism that resides in home archives, in found footage – fake documentaries – and, in general, in that atmosphere that seemed to come from the past, and even from dreams. They were images that managed to move because they showed sequences for which she felt longing despite not having experienced them.
“Going back to the past means returning to comfort, to the familiar, to the place where one feels safe. Maybe this explains why there are now young kids taking photos at concerts. trap with cell phones from years ago and taking the trouble to transfer these photos to the computer. Or people shooting video clips with MiniDV cameras. It’s the same kind of nostalgia that Wim Wenders includes in the film Paris, Texasscenes from years ago in Super 8 movies: it moves us back,” conclude Cristóbal Benavente and Marta Arquero.
This attraction to nostalgia and the emotional weight of images is visibly translated into figures, since hashtags like #filmphotography have 40,764,153 followers and it is increasingly common to see videos like this, in which current couples imitate the photographs that their parents took when they were their age, filling social networks with an eighties and nineties retrospective that, although it is not achieved exclusively with analog cameras, is characterized by the nostalgia of that time devoid of so much imposition. “People want to feel natural again, to have references on which to base ourselves without fearing that everything is false. We are tired of not being able to believe what we see, of being bombarded with messages that are not real and that generate toxic feelings for no reason. I think it is a trend that should be maintained and promoted by all creators and that would give them added value,” says Clara Sanz regarding the fashion of images taken with analog cameras on social networks.
This industry experienced an evident decline with the arrival of digitalization and already in 2012 the journalist Ramón Peco asked himself in an article in The country whether analog photography would survive. In it, the delicate situation that these companies were going through was studied. There was also writing about Otrowski’s bet, who sold his own photographs by positifying them with chemical materials of the best quality, and who stated that this proposal had had some success because the motivations behind it went beyond numbers. “It may seem like a romantic statement, and it probably is, but we must not forget that the photography business fuels many dreams. And for some, those dreams cannot be captured with digital technology,” Ramón Peco reflected at the time.
Maybe this is the crux of the matter. Charlotte Wells manages to capture all that melancholy with Sophie’s home videos in Aftersun. It is not trivial that a film that talks about memory and the survival of images in the brain revolves around these archives, nor that the memory of Sophie’s last night with her father in that hotel in Turkey is a snapshot taken with a Polaroid. That crucial moment, materialized with an analog camera, is physical proof that all those scenes existed, even though they are now blurred and confused with those in her “mental camera.” The consternation generated by this unique image that tastes like a farewell gift would not have been achieved with a selfie lost among thousands of others that are saved in the phone gallery; That Polaroid stops being an image and becomes a treasure, something that can still be touched when everything else is gone, in a small crack of that moment.
It is not analog, but it does belong to a past time
Regardless of the success that the return of analog photography is bringing, there is another phenomenon that should not be ignored and that is directly related to the return of the Y2K trends, so fashionable in recent times: the use of digital cameras. Surely many millennials remember to always carry one in their bag in the same way they kept their keys or mobile phone, as well as arriving home after a pleasant meeting with friends or a trip, plugging it into the computer and downloading all the photos. Perhaps that flash that dyed the eyes red and the skin nuclear white also resides in memory, or the scenes in which celebrities who were then on the crest of the wave, such as Paris Hilton, carried them like an extension of their hand. .
On social networks it is also quite common to see photographs taken with this type of camera, including influencers. In fact, it is not something isolated to find videos in which current couples imitate the photographs that their parents took when they were their age, filling Instagram with a retro aesthetic thanks to digital cameras.
#tired #selfie #gradual #surprising #return #analog #cameras