Chapter 7: The Revival of Film

week 9 inquiry

Isn’t it funny that in this day and age with all this easy access to technology, the teens of today ditch their expensive phone cameras that they already own to buy a film camera and continue to pay for expensive rolls of film and it’s development. If you want to save some money Here is a link to a website that has step by step instructions on how to develop your own film!. I know many of my friends, including myself have fallen into to trend. This is a link to my roommate Beth’s Film collection Instagram Page , although these are not my own photos I want to share as I feel it captures the teen girl vibe that has taken over the film world, that and I will actually be in these photos as I am behind the camera in all of mine.

I think this attraction to film stems from this generation growing up with a camera in our pocket everywhere we went and the ability to snap picture after picture and never fear the idea of “wasting a photo”. Even our main form of communication was through Snapchat which required you to send a photo for every text, and especially the early version of the app didn’t have a chat only option. The idea of only having 1 chance to get the photo and only 36 photos in a singular roll is attractive to use because it differs from what we have accustomed to. We have to be intentional with these memories and I think waiting for the development is beneficial to this generation as we are all so desperate for the instant gratification we receive through the internet and technology in general. I know that I also love that film in physical, I know you can always print out photos from your phone but realistically no one really does it – I have full photo albums from the last 3 years of having my point and shoot but not one from any of the last 10 years I have had a device with a camera in my pocket.

I love that film photos can’t be altered easily like digital photos. I find that my generation is so obsessed with our appearance and how others perceive us that we have led to normalizing altering our photos – our memories, the captured moments of our lives that we will show to our children. As I was growing up my mum was always pulling our her childhood photos and I always loved seeing how alike we look at every age. It makes me sad to think that in the future there will be a large group of adults who have will only have photoshopped or filtered photos for their children to compare themselves to – which we all know will be detrimental to the kids self-confidence.