Future Nostalgia: Why Gen Z Are Bringing The Digital Camera Back
More than anything, it’s a means of playfully documenting the self, others, our stories or surroundings through a grainy, artful perspective.
Janan Jama
If photography is renewed evidence of our existence, then: I photograph, therefore, I am. Or is it: I am photographed, thus, I exist? Either way, whether you’re flicking through personal photo albums, or scrolling through an iPhone camera roll, our sense of being becomes startingly material.
At the risk of sounding like a ham-fisted boomer, there’s something to be said about the film roll versus the camera roll. Besides the very fun fact that the latter has corrupted how we view our memories, Gen Z is actively exploring modes of capture beyond their phones. And who can blame us? With new media as pervasive as it is, it follows that we’re embracing more analogue, devolved forms of tech. In fact, I welcome all budding storytellers and bedroom documentarians!
But before consulting Barthes and Berger*, I asked my mum. She came of age during a time when childhood memories were captured on camcorders, and Snappy Snaps was King. She says, for her, the decided act of using a digital or film camera was reserved for events that held significance. One-offs. Birthday parties, snow days, and other such occasions she wanted to keep for posterity. These opportunities presented ‘a Kodak moment,’ which not only meant a scene worth photographing but it bore a collateral meaning— ‘a business’s failure to foresee,’ in part due to the Kodak Company’s unfortunate lack of foresight to manage the overtaking of film and cameras by smartphones and other digital technologies.
Barthes would ask,
“Of all the objects in the world: why photograph this object, this moment, rather than some other?”
When smartphones further democratised picture-taking, it not only became faster and easier to take pictures, but it became just as fast and easy to view and share them too. What constituted a Kodak moment in the age of Instagram was redefined. They were a sunset, a cool movie poster, or your breakfast.
While photography “photographs the notable,” it also “decrees notable whatever it photographs,” making the act of sharing photographs online a tombic gallery of the self.
And in this gallery, you are the curator.
The photo dump, carousels of seemingly casually selected pictures, is a perfect example. While it was intended as an anti-aesthetic to the ultra-curated–explaining why the current President of the United States has now gotten in on it— it sparked debate about the casual use of Instagram, in this way, being an even greater performance of authenticity. After all, it’s harder to achieve a messy bun than a neat one.
But now that Instagram is almost totally divorced from its photo-sharing origins due to the recent emphasis of video on the platform, there must be other options. For a moment, BeReal temporarily answered this general malaise. What else?
With the recent increase in digital camera sales, it appears we’re reaching full circle, and as with most fads now, this is a tale as old as TikTok. The concept of romanticising one’s life—yes, I’m citing that—is the philosophy, co-opted by zoomers, built around magnifying the mundane and centring yourself as the ‘main character’. All very filmic. So filmic, it practically invites an imaginary camera crew to tag along. No wonder why old-school camcorders are now purchased to serve as vintage vehicles to capture these intimacies of life.
Take vlog vixen Emma Chamberlain, who switched to recording with a Sony Handycam last year. Droves of comments asked what camera she was using, as her everyday routine had the changed layer of a proverbially rose-tinted lens to it. While this effect isn’t new, it’s new to her young audience. And what better way to create novelty out of tech from the nineties and noughties than for them to be repackaged as an “era aesthetic” for an audience who aren’t old enough to remember them? Come on, it’s so Y2K, indie sleaze…
I can only suppose why this is so appealing. It gives us a chance to see ourselves othered. And in between time. The grain, its inherent age, and artful amateurishness all contribute to this. It’s a means of playfully documenting ourselves and others as well as our stories and surroundings without the pressures of cinematic or curatorial convention. It’s also playing with time, as the resultant photograph or video is both present but deferred. “A prophecy in reverse,” as Barthes calls it. (I loved Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun for this reason.)
1999, modelling off of mama at home.
To be your own director, equipped with a 90s model Panasonic HD camcorder, means something. Especially in 2023. Stylistically, it creates a contemporary time capsule— anachronism at its most intense, recording something so groundingly modern on the kind of tech you’d associate with bygone home videos. To see life captured in this way is akin to arresting a memory—our best attempt at immobilising time. Maybe my fear of a failing memory leads me to an obsessive bout of documenting: through pictures, videos, and journals that date back to 2010. I’m Sammy Jankis* with a system of cues, not clues. But whenever I return to this photo of my mother and me, its candidness strikes me. There’s a total absence of performance. Mainly as I’m too young to know what “say cheese!” means. But at most, I’m only performing for her. I’ve taken film photos decades later, hoping to emulate such frankness.
2022, a different kind of hat this time, graduation.
In essence, the camera feels like a lo-fi callback to the nineties and noughties. And them being “back” employs the same logic behind the return of the flip phone. It’s all anachronism. The camera has acquired a new kind of impressiveness in the hands of the youth. We’re playing with the oddities of time and exploring other ways of viewing ourselves. It harkens to a time when we were too unconscious of caring. Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the mission to “depressurise Instagram”, as the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, puts it. I, for one, hope it’s an aspirational detachment from new media. But you’re going to develop the film and post them under the 35mm hashtag anyway. Guilty.
Janan Jama, a writer and editor from London, is interested in how we choose to busy ourselves today. She writes cultural criticism of the Internet, new media, and pop culture to cope. Say hello. Find her here.
* Roland Barthes ‘Camera Lucida’ and John Berger’s ‘Ways Of Seeing’ are seminal theoretical works about photography as art that I used to inform my argument.
* A character in Memento (2000) with anterograde amnesia. The protagonist uses a system of Polaroid pictures and notes to track information he cannot remember due to his condition.
