Filmic Revolution

The other day a guy at work gave me a copy of Getty Images' Creative In Focus 2015.

This is a pretty fascinating annual that I'd never heard of before, but in essence, as a stock image firm, Getty's art directors catalogue the visual trends of a given year and write essays about how the years popular images echo wider cultural paradigms and societal changes around the world.

For example, an essay titled 'Genderblend' highlights the growing dismissal of traditional gender roles in the 21st Century and the gradual 'blending' the sexes, which is being mirrored in commercial photography with images of babies being lovingly held in the meaty tattooed forearm of a father, or women - unburdened of both makeup and sexualisation - working on cars, being popular purchases.

The essay that most caught my eye, however, was by art director Lauren Catten on the resurgence of 'analogue' photography. Now, I won't lie, I have been somewhat swept up with technology lately - and for all my past slewing of instagram and its faux-analogue effects, I am indeed an Instagram user now and where I had started simply posting images of my favourite artwork - I have now become one of the boring millions who documents stuff like their cat...

But having read Catten's piece on film, she has touched on points I've made before and re-inspired me to engage with analogue photography again. She starts:


'In the midst of the digital revolution, speed has gained asendence over everything. Speed is perfect for the beta generation, offering infinite opportunities to click without thought... [but] ...the nostalgia for analogue photography is so powerful that its filmic color palettes, the vignettes and grain are widely appropriated by apps and software in a bid to capture something that all the sharpness and accuracy of digital cannot. But it is not just about nostalgia or even aesthetics - the growing number of photographers now choosing film are drawn as much to the process and experience as the end result.'

I have touched upon this precise subject and made this precise point before but what I love about Catten's observations - and the fact her essay is prompted as a reflection to commercial trends - is that the aesthetics of film, like you get with instagram, are finally being acknowledged not to be the whole of the thing.

She continues, 'Returning to this process of 'slow photography' is more than a fetishizing of vintage techniques, it is about delving into the emotional connection and deep pleasure that can be gained from slowing down, absorbing and considering your subject.'


As someone who started in photography for precisely these reasons; with the documenting of experience being an experience itself, I'm glad that film has once again become a 'thing'. It can only bode well for the resurgence, albeit in a small way, of film puveyors and traditionalist outlets which, as I've lamented before, have been drying up and discontinuing at a relentless pace for years. It is also good that now the realisation comes that the experience of the photographic process, as much as the flaws and happy accidents that comes with dealing in chemistry, are as large a part of what the medium is as the end result itself. And I'm glad that article has helped me remember that.