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.
I think there’s been quite the push towards that look as a reactionary move away from the hyper technical cameras that inhabit the landscape today. Old photographs, and particularly the family snapshot with crappy exposure and funky coloring, has largely been lost. The simplicity, the frivolity, and the unknown suspense has been sucked out of it by machinegunned perfect exposure photos (and this isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just different). What’s funny is that taking a quality photo has become easier, but the character of these old shots has been replaced by sterility, so people are looking for mistakes in photos, a return to humanity and its flaws, which is now harder to do since most of the process is automated.
Why did handmade products, with their quirks and eccentricities, lose most of their draw when industrialization took over? I’d move that it wasn’t just cost, and it’s the same pattern that we see in photography, with things coming full circle. Distressed jeans, aged timber for support in homes, all these things are purposefully flawed. They speak to us, they bear that mark of time we all feel upon ourselves. It’s an attempt to humanize the process, to make it warmer and more comforting.
Most of the “retro” look we’re seeing out there today is not from folks using film cameras, but from liberal use of Photoshop actions and their ilk on digital images.
Call me a curmudgeon, but like others I think it’s largely a fad, destined to burn out in time. I just feel sorry for the folks getting married who are getting all the washed-out sepia-toned pseudo-scratched images. Do you think they’re going to get a nostalgic feeling in 10 years because of it? Or just wish they could relive the day through their photos? (Although, granted: most couples are getting these images on purpose.)
The question of why its popular.
I think for the same reasons that fashions, hairstyles and baby names go in and out then in again.
To the inferred question of what do I think about it.
My photography isn’t tied to any particular trend or look. I make photographs based on the context of the project. I can say right now I don’t care for that look. Tomorrow I may get a wild hair up my a** and decide to do retro styled shoot, but not because its popular right now.
I have become somewhat addicted to Hipstamatic. As one person described it to me, after years of training this app allows me to shoot bad. To not control every aspect of the picture taking process. It has an element of freedom that I adore. I still shoot technically correct, accurated images, but every once in a while, I want to shoot incorrectly, with faulty lens that create vignettes and washed out or overly saturated colours. I get to shoot bad and I love it. For me it is a form of freedom. I’m not doing it for any body else myself.
I fully understand what you’re talking about.
I do most of my retro processing on my iPhone. With phone photography, it takes the natural limitations of a camera phone photo (grain, lesser quality) and processes it to best advantage by using the retro styling.
I am partial to vintage Lightroom presets, too, though.