I’m sorry I said film photography matters. What I actually mean is; it doesn’t. Digital photography is vastly superior. A modern camera asks three things of the user: take the lens cap off, point it at stuff, don’t drop it. The photos will be in focus, perfectly, exposed, and technically excellent. The erosion of photographic complexity and the shift towards a pixel democracy has been happening ever since Instagram made its first filters. Film photography should be dead except we have millions of cameras, detritus of the world’s most popular hobby, and eBay.
Film photography is growing in popularity again. This might be news to you if you’re a fully-rounded human adult with a career, hobbies, friends, and a sense of fulfillment through achieving any number of societally-decreed personal milestones. It will not be news if you are a loner, a weirdo, or extremely-online. Dominant in this resurgence are young people (as always) with well-off parents (no surprises) living in suburbs (that tracks). It explains why photo sharing sites are wall-to-wall photos of cars with spoilers, basketball hoops, bored looking girlfriends, and gas stations at night.
I want to walk back one thing: these young people are responding to stimuli, which is generally in the form of celebrities posting mirror selfies taken with film cameras to Instagram, both making film photography “cool” while also driving up the cost of entry as eBay sellers mark-up the prices of the dusty Contax T2, Fujifilm Klasse W, or Nikon 35Ti cameras they’ve been sitting on. (It happens to digital cameras too; when ‘Only Murders in the Building’ featured a Paul Frank edition Leica, it immediately jumped up $1000 in value on used sites.) [I don’t know enough about the lives of celebrities to deduce how an old film camera ends up in their hands; it seems so impractical to be jetsetting around with an analog camera that requires fiddly, hard to find batteries, and the difficulty of finding a film lab of any kind… I guess it’s not that much work if you have a personal assistant.]
When you start off playing with a camera the first thing you photograph is everything around you. Celebrities photograph themselves. Suburban kids photograph gas stations; there’s nothing else that’s nearby that’s lit-up at night. It’s hard not to feel bad for these kids, who don’t seem aware that everything around them sucks. Not to stand inside a glass house with a bucket of rocks; my first forays into “serious” photography involved carrying a kitchen chair out into the middle of a curve in our street, placing it under a streetlamp, then putting a Pentax K1000 on tripod (equipment borrowed from my high school). I did the whole thing with the deadly seriousness and self-importance only a teenager can radiate. I truly had no idea what I was doing but I felt very deeply that I was being artistic.
Now that everyone has stopped reading I can get to my point. I love shooting film because it means my mistakes are both harmless and permanent. I make mistakes in digital photography too but those don’t count as they are electronic and virtual. A mistake on film is a combination of physics and chemistry that is effectively permanent. And it costs me money too, which means even if I fuck up a photo I’m still going to share it because I believe in getting my money’s worth. Which has also taught me one more thing: technical perfection is a trap; if a photo is good, technical perfection only eliminates distracting elements.
I am sure I’ve said a lot of nothing this time. That’s OK. I’m multiplying my headspace by the time of year we’re in and I’m sure none of us are clear on much. Thanks for subscribing, or at the very least thanks for opening this email then immediately deleting it; it still counts as an opened email on my Substack dashboard.
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