Hey all, Erik here with a quick guest post about a subject that’s raised a lively debate in our studio. Everyone on our crew has long been shooting with Polaroids, rangefinders, micro 4/3 cameras adapted to accept vintage lenses…even processing digital images to look like they came out of an old dusty camera. Surveying the landscape, it’s clear this tide has been rising for a while now and we’re not the only ones attached to this stuff. So the question I present to you is this:
Why is retro or faux-retro photography so popular these days?
Why, when we have such capable and inexpensive cameras at our disposal, are we reverting to old technology and old aesthetics? Is it pure nostalgia? Is it a palette cleanser from the ease and accuracy of said capable and inexpensive cameras? Is it a passing trend? We have opinions–especially Chase does as you might expect–but we’d like to hear from you.
It’s exactly because vintage is a trend that I probably won’t shoot/process any of it. While I like the look in small doses, it seems like it is being over done. And I certainly wouldn’t incorporate it into “my style”, whatever that is.
It’s the same reason I would never own a tilt/shift lens. One, it seems to be all the rage. And two, if I shot enough tilt/shift images to justify owning a lens, I would be worried about becoming a one-trick pony.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t LOVE to rent a tilt/shift on occasion. 🙂
I personally am gravitating towards the “nostalgic” reasoning. Something about polaroids unmistakable qualities give us a blast from the past when we could frame an image and have it in our hands within seconds (rather than on an lcd.) Turning an image around from shoot to print can sometimes be a grueling and long process where now we, as photogs, can be much more critical of each others post processing. With polaroids the conceptual qualities that would make a contemporary photo “stunning” are suddenly easily achievable, hence it’s popularity amongst all photogs pro or amateur.
I wrote about this issue in my blog. I paste here my opinion and you can go the link to see some photos.
http://hernanzenteno.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/translations/
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” Garry Winogrand.
That sentence has been in my mind for a while because I found that since the beginning of the the digital age of photography I began to see, more and more, the tendency to alter the image. David Burnett, for example, noticed the problem first. We ended working with the same cameras, the same lenses, the same staged scenes by PR people. Almost all news pictures ended the same. Also the photojournalism environment of contests began to show a lot of heavily retouched photos.
Some people returned to film in order to resist the surgical reality that is portrayed with modern digital cameras. The latest fancy tool is the Polaroid style photos made by an application in the iPhone. I found myself playing with a Holga, a 4×5 camera, old roll cameras and now with a new software that mimics the old square format look of cheap plastic cameras from the 70´s.
I have always supported the qualities found on film. The most important qualities to me have a direct relationship with the sentence of Winogrand. Diane Arbus referred to this too: “One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in”. And: “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse”.
I never really can be sure how something photographed with film will look. It depends on the developer, the film, and the process I use to print. And is a matter of the medium in itself, the isolation of the subject, the freeze of a hummingbird flight. Everything is a matter of translation. I like to interpret something and in this process I choose my tools like a musician choose a piano, a violin or a guitar. I am not talking about cut and paste, clone parts of the photo or staged scenes. I like the fun of take photos of the things like they are but at the same time i like the translation that occurs in the process. Now, with the digital cameras, the software is part of that process. Let me show you an experiment i did trying to do a tribute to the fun of taking photos, the old cameras and the film as a way of translating the reality. And to remember that the beach is not a dump.
Oh geez people. For the love of it all, lighten up a bit. Retro is popular because it’s fun. It’s spontaneous. It’s silly and imperfect and surreal. And because the look of it makes us feel good. Like looking through the box of photo albums from my childhood right next to my desk here. Makes me feel nostalgic and warm and happy. It doesn’t matter if the pictures were taken today or 35 years ago. The fact that anyone can achieve this on an iPhone is no more threatening to your professional status and expert knowledge than GarageBand is to recording engineers. If it gives people access and lets them have fun and express themselves and share through an art form we all love, then all the better.
I love shooting film, both for still and motion. There’s something about the extra care I take to setup my shot, double check my light meter and hear the the film being exposed. It’s exciting. I shoot a lot of digital. I think it’s awesome that we have a choice, 20 years ago, we had to shoot film… now we get to!
As far as the retro thing goes… I’ve had this discussion with some of my friends. I’m amazed at how many iPhone apps I have that make images look old. A photo straight from a digital camera can always use some work, it’s killer that we have the ability to do a little work to our images coming our of our phones! Awww, technology.