Photography / About a month ago, I was hanging out with my family, talking and taking photos outside my grandmother’s apartment in North Los Angeles. When my 3-year-old cousin heard the click of a camera pointed at her, she reached for it, then flipped it around to see how her picture had come out. What she saw instead was the back of my Lomo LC-A. Her confused expression is the face of our digital future. It’s also a future that a growing movement of people are rejecting, as they embrace photo technologies–and not even for the technologies themselves, as much as for the way they enable us to see the world–long since deemed archaic. In short, film is back.

Brave new world

In the past decade, just about everything–from photos to music to movies, even literature–has gone digital. Digital cameras are as common as cell phones and cameras in cell phones are as common as space bars on keyboards. And the instant gratification this technology allows is something everyone now expects. It’s normal to see groups of young people shoot multiple takes of the same photo because the first shot caught one of them blinking, or another one looking “fat.” Long gone are the days of keeping your fingers crossed that the once in a lifetime photo-op at Machu Picchu comes out. With online photo-sharing enabled by sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook, instant gratification entails the instant sharing of life moments.

“Digital photography has become ubiquitous in our lives,” says Gaye Chan, from the University of Hawaii’s Department of Art and Art History. “We encounter it at the dentist office, when renewing our driver’s licenses. [Digital photo technologies] are as commonplace as Post-it notes.”

So why the pushback against technologies that are easy to use and everywhere already? One of the major catalysts to film’s growing resurgence is Lomography. The company started in the early ’90s when two students in Vienna discovered a small Russian camera called the Lomo Kompakt Automat, and decided it was worthy of global distribution.

These arty and quirky 35-milimeter cameras–known for producing photos with oversaturated colors, soft blurs and vivid contrasts–emphasize spontaneity in captured moments, and have become incredibly popular in the past few years.

The camera’s parent company, Lomographische AG, has become wildly successful selling analog products online and now in retail stores. A key to film’s recent return to popularity is Lomography’s selection of Toy Cameras such as the Holga and Diana models. These are plastic cameras, originally created to be given away as prizes or gifts. Because of the relatively small financial investment they require–they start around $50–they have become gateways for people interested in experimenting with film.

Worth the wait

I made sure I had my Lomo that day outside of Grandma’s house. I see my film photos to be more valuable than my throwaway digitals, so I choose carefully the moments to shoot with film. The photo I took of my cousin meant much more to everyone since it was unique to the hundreds of digital photos that have been taken of her throughout her life.

“By taking up a film camera,” says Chan, “especially the likes of Lomos and Dianas, is to throw a wrench into our amped-up, data-overloaded, immediate-gratification-fixated lives.”

The wrench Chan refers to is one that we–those of us who gravitate toward Lomos and other non-digital technologies–are also throwing at the level of convenience that digital products offer. Maybe we subconsciously feel the need to step back from the immediate gratification by which we’re so spoiled. If we don’t, when will our growing impatience stop? Will we watch our kids lose their minds when they have to wind a camera or pick up the needle of the record player to go to the next song? Or, more scary still, they won’t know what to do with non-digital technologies when confronted with them.

This isn’t something new; there are endless older technologies that would baffle even those who grew up on typewriters and record players. It is technological evolution. I grew up in the 1980s and I barely used rotary phones, so when it came time to use one as a child I imagine my confused expression looked much like my cousin’s. Unlike film, I don’t see myself embracing a rotary phone again. There needs to be a functional purpose behind the preference for analog.

Purity has its place in our digital world. To me, film is the best current example. We are in notoriously tough times economically, yet we have seen more people spending money on film. The digital world is a young one, but we can expect some forms of analog technology to keep its place in our lives. Using film goes past our love of nostalgia, it’s not just “old school,” it’s real.

Film offers a reflection of its subjects, not just literally but in the way it contains natural imperfections. Film grains are like lines on our faces, they are unique to each brand of film. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a digital photo and thought, “Canon.” But I’ve looked at film photos and known unmistakably, “That’s AGFA Precisa or Kodak Ektar.” In the same way we recognize a familiar face, we can recognize film.

Going both ways

This resurgence in analog can mean many things. Maybe our toe-in-the-water of digital photography is like the cliché of sexual experimentation in college. Some tried it, it wasn’t for them, so back to what works. Maybe the people who experimented with their digital sexuality liked a different format, so they stuck with it. Some like both, lets call them bi-technical. What’s great is we have a choice: it’s our decision to be made. Personally, I travel with both a digital camera and my Lomo LC-A. Like the old farmer who doesn’t see why a tractor is better then his shovel, I find they both are relevant forms of technology in my life. We are in an era where we can bake our cake and microwave it, too.

“Can having only 10 exposures at our disposal, having to wait for hours or days to see the result, force us to be more attentive?” asks Chan. “Do fragile little sheets of negatives, plastic camera bodies that leak light and screw up, make us more aware of the forces around us? I’d say the answer is yes… Ease, speed and immediate gratification can be highly overrated.”

From the look on my cousin’s face, the one in the photo above, I can’t help but agree.

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