The Retro Point & Shoot
Why do some people use less convenient cameras?
How does a standalone camera justify use in the age of total photographic convenience? It seems obvious that professional and passionate hobbyist photographers will sacrifice convenience for superior image quality, but increasingly, young people eschew phone cameras in favour of a camera which is less convenient and often also lower fidelity. In this article we’ll look into the retro point and shoot as a lifestyle device both in what it says about our present moment in history, and we’ll make some guesses at why a more burdensome and lower fidelity rendering of life appeals to us.
Lomography and the claim to authenticity
“Digital imaging and its ability to simulate an image without its necessary referent in the physical world severely destabilised the familiar axiom of photographic truth.” Kenneth Tay, Uncanny Signs: Lomography and its Profane Illuminations.
The lomography movement was born out of a small group of Viennese photographers who collected and used the Russian made Cosina knock-off Lomo LC-A around the fall of the iron curtain. In 1995 the group successfully petitioned the Russian company LOMO PLC to bring back production of the LC-A, which would be sold under license by the Lomography company.
While it would come to stand as the counterpoint of digital perfection the LC-A’s popularity predated commercially available digital cameras, its novelty was owed to the fall of the iron curtain, and a counterpoint to new technologies in digital manipulation.
“By exploiting the lingering belief that the analogue image enjoys a privileged connection with the real, Lomographers produce analogue images known as Lomographs which instead present reality as a sign whose stability is necessarily haunted by a necessary deferral of its final meaning.” Kenneth Tay, Uncanny Signs: Lomography and its Profane Illuminations.
Via the notion of unpredictability, the Lomograph can claim to be both more truthful and more artful — all without the artifice of traditionally composed imagery. Toy cameras render life into art with a minimum of inconvenience to the user.
The ritual of analog photography as an antidote to alienating digital technologies is spelled out in Lomography’s 2010 Ten Prophesies of an Analog Future.
“Live offline but share online. Have fun, laugh, flirt, seduce (with your camera), remember (on film), don’t worry (in life) and shoot from the hip.”
The lasting popularity of film cameras has become a little less prosaic, but the broad strokes are still there: A film camera delays gratification, it puts obstacles between the photographer and their image, and the resultant images are already stylised. Even if the timelines don’t quite match up, film photography harkens back to a time before widespread image manipulation- a step back into a pre-post-truth world.
For most photographers, this notion of truth is a shield against criticism. It allows technically subpar images to pass muster as a more honest and real interpretation of the photographed event. In this way film photography is a self-imposed handicap which bolsters the reputation of otherwise lower quality images. But while I believe this was the original contract for film photography, the same idea appears in mirrored form with image aesthetics which are praised specifically for the appearance of technical flaws related to film photography. Blur from dated lens technologies becomes ‘glow’, colour shifts carry a sense of timelessness, the risk of light leaks and missed exposures speak to ‘tangibility’.
The same way that inconvenience becomes a more artful, thoughtful way of photographing, the markers of technical flaw become artifacts of this heightened practice. Without getting distracted by criticism for the narratives of film photography, I have added an endnote at the bottom of this article. Whether film essentially is of a different tangibility to digital photography is another conversation, what remains important is its cultural reputation for nostalgia and honesty.
The Retro Point & Shoot — Camera as event
Whatever the magic of film, it does not appear to belong to the emulsion itself, at least not in the eyes of many users. Digital LUTs, plugins and niche cameras all take aim at the tonality of popular films divorced from the inconvenience. Instagram filters once offered borders designed to look like medium format scans. Even the obstacles and inconveniences of film have digital analogues in older digital point and shoot cameras which require proprietary adapters and software. For the next generation, photographic nostalgia will continue either with or without the film itself.
Modern teenagers are more likely than not to have missed out on the photo albums filled with 1 hour minilab prints. They definitely missed the evenings huddled behind a slide projector. We have seen the floppy disk icon lose its status as the universal symbol for saving a document, and may well be just a few years away from film losing its status as the universal marker for nostalgia.
So what is the appeal of a retro digital point and shoot as a lifestyle device? Since the New York Times’ article The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera several people have attempted to speculate at exactly what in an outdated camera without the magic of film emulsion appeals to Gen Z.
Whether a digital point & shoot can be considered ‘film like’ is entirely dependent on which qualities of film imagery you are privileging. Digital sensors which are now considered in-league with film were considered a poor imitations of the tonal advantages of film at the time. But can a cybershot from 2003 create images which strike the same aesthetic nuances as a Holga? For this writer and many others, a blurry frame of a house party shot with direct flash looks functionally identical whether captured on $5 of 120 film or 2.3 megapixels.
Two opposing processes work towards the same result: In one, images from a phone or modern camera are treated to mimic the appearance of film or older digital cameras. In the other, and more interesting process, the inconveniences of film or dated digital cameras are willingly adopted, accepting both the aesthetic qualities and the inconvenience. One of the most compelling answers to the latter question comes from the work of Tim Gorichanaz, who sums up several of his own studies alongside related arguments in Why are so many Gen Z-ers drawn to old digital cameras? For The Conversation. For Gorichanaz, it is the search for meaning which draws younger generations to these outmoded technologies:
“Old cameras, in particular, have a set of qualities that help users make meaning. First, the image quality is poorer. But on social media, photos that get posted are less about polish and precision and more about sharing experiences and telling stories.”
Gorichanaz’s article cites Arbore, Soscia, and Bagozzi’s The Role of Signaling Identity in the Adoption for Personal Technologies, which suggests that these personal technologies signal identity and uniqueness. In effect the homogenisation of Instagram is undercut by unpolished imagery.
“Need for uniqueness is the individual’s tendency to seek individuality through the adoption and use of symbolic products or innovations, which represents a kind of counter-conformism. Also in this case, we maintain that “uniqueness” is not necessarily — or at least not solely — what people wish to convey through new adoptions. Again, as in the case of “status”, uniqueness might capture only part of the personal self- identity that technology adoption may express: it conveys a specific aspect of the personal self, and not even the whole personal self, and it fails to consider the social self.” Arbore, Soscia, and Bagozzi.
Past generations held a reverence toward photography which is lost on our image supersaturated world. In the imagery of Nan Goldin and Dian Arbus we see a privilege in being photographed. In Goldin’s work a willingness to exhibit candor, in Arbus’ an acceptance of the camera’s gaze. The urge to ‘ruin’ an image by pulling a face appears to be a new convention, exclusive to generations where a click of the shutter comes at no cost. While older digital cameras do not cost money for every image, the hurdles to a camera’s use, the low expectations for success, and the understanding that further effort is required to bring the photos online, all contribute to the retro point and shoot’s unique appeal.
The qualities of the retro image
Instagram either catalysed or rode the wave of the retro image aesthetic. Once uploaded to Instagram, there is often very little distinguishing an image shot with a Lomo or a coolpix from one shot on an iPhone and digitally degraded. In the above paragraphs we drew some conclusions as to why a less convenient camera can appeal to someone’s sense of identity, and to centre camera as an event — but why add the artifice of such cameras to an already technically perfect digital image? Why add light leaks to a camera which can’t physically leak light?
In Filter Focus: The Story Behind the Original Instagram Filters Cole Rise says that the first Instagram filters originated from the same impulse for which they are likely currently used, “Selfishly I just didn’t have time to edit photos before uploading them to their platform and they had the same idea,” Rise explained. “I thought this is great so I just injected my exact editing process for what I did with my work specifically into four filters.”
Beyond Rise’s aesthetic tastes, early Instagram filters took a lot of cues from film aesthetics. Each filter even included a frame which, depending on the filter, would mimic a printed film image, a slide, polaroid, or the borders of a full width 120 film scan.
Photo Filter Apps: Understanding Analogue Nostalgia in the New Media Ecology provides compelling ideas as to why the markers of film photography are applied to digital images on spaces like Instagram:
“Notably, while such errors were typically caused by cheap material, inexpensive plastic lenses, light leakage, and unskilled film processing, they have actually become popular additions to the lo-fi look (Smith 2011), perhaps because mobile digital photographers hark back to the spontaneity of the chance image taken on a limited roll of film.”
“In other words, Instagram emerges from a culture where the old, the authentic, the analogue is still a repository of value and appreciation. It also represents a depository of memories and timeless nostalgia, but this nostalgia is not merely yearning for yesterday (Davis 1979, 16), but is a creative tool for the present. Given that young users of social networks have never experienced the time when light leaks and underdevelopment were common problems in analogue photography, the nostalgia for the signifiers of time does not necessarily induce emotional responses linked to the manual handling of photographic film. Rather, instagrammed photos ironically play with temporality by adding visual signs of decay.”
Caoduro’s analysis is both satisfying and poetic: that what we do know of light leaks, heavy grain and washed out colours is that the content of the image made it worth holding onto. In appropriating those signifiers we say (and perhaps as a crutch against the self consciousness of putting our lives in others’ view online) that whatever the technical prowess, we found the content of this image worth preserving.
The Instagram impulse may reveal itself as more sinister and narcissistic in retrospect, but I don’t believe this happens consciously. Consciously we want to preserve, to inform, to share. The marks of age, whether digitally applied or mechanically acquired allow us to signify to ourselves and others that this moment mattered. That we think it’s something worth remembering.
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Endnote:
Sympathisers of film photography often cite a sense of tangibility in that the chemical reactions of the film emulsion are in some way more real than their digital analogue. I wonder, once the photographer has loaded their film, how much actual tangibility there is in a film exposure. All cameras, characteristically and literally, act as a black box. While we can academically understand both the chemical process of the latent image and the measurement systems of the digital sensor, we are blind to both. Photographers also cite the simplicity of chemical process as purer and more freeing than the encoded into binary bits. As if the latent image of exposed silver salts is any more real before it is developed, fixed, stabilised and printed, than an image which is reliably encoded and then decoded.
This becomes its most frustrating when photographers hand off to a lab for the entirety of their processing, colour correction, scanning, to then praise film for its out-of-the-box good looks. Very few photographers would be willing to hire an editor to correct their digital images with no aesthetic input, so why does the same process take on a mystical quality when performed on film emulsion rather than digital files? One more time and louder for the people in the back: A negative is not an image.
