Although I can only speculate, I would say it’s a relatively safe bet that some day our current hip culture will be reflected upon as obsessed with outmoded media. Retro clothing trends have of course been a constant throughout the past century, but as far as I can tell there has never before been such an obsession with using the technology of generations gone by. Vinyl record sales have been continually rising since 2006, and now even cassettes, a format objectively inferior to digital audio, are looking like the may have a shot at a comeback.
Along with music, photography has been quietly building a nouveau-analog movement of its own. Though film photography can rest on laurels similar to that of vinyl (both formats are arguably competitive with their digital counterparts), instant photography takes it a step further. Much like cassettes, instant photography has very little logical benefit in comparison to digital formats, but yet, it is seeing sales stronger than it has in a decade or two. This raises the question, are those friends of yours with Polaroid and Instax cameras on their shelves hipster doofuses, or is there really something to the hype? I for one, the proud owner of a Lomo’instant Wide Camera, assert that there are at least a few reasons you should consider trying it out. After all...
How often do you look at your 30th Instagram photo? What about the photos you uploaded to Facebook in 2007? When’s the last time you checked out those photos you deleted last week because your phone ran out of space? Although photos have never been easier to take, there has seemed to be a direct correlation between the proliferation of photographs and their collective unimportance. For whatever reason, the plentiful nature of media has transformed the life of a photograph into a much faster affair. Taken, exposed to many if it’s lucky enough to make it out of your camera roll, and instantly forgotten. We’ve reached the peak of a process that’s been happening for years. The first consumer photography systems were expensive and reserved for special occasions: births, deaths, victories and so on. It’s only been a hop, skip, and a jump from there to cheaply made plastic disposable cameras, and wham–here we are today. In the digital world, how are you meant to take special notice of a photo you took last month when it is one of hundreds? Enter one of my favorite aspects of the instant camera. Once a photo is taken, it cannot help but be noticed. Jutted out from the camera, an instant photograph uses its physicality to refuse being ignored. Try as you might to forget it, you now have a physical monument to a moment in time, and even if you don’t look at it every day, it will need to be put somewhere. And, unlike that third photo you took of your delicious eggs Benedict this morning, an instant photo will remain long after the day it is taken, and even open up the possibility of being nostalgically found in a shoebox someday.
2. It Encourages Selective Photographs
One of the many ways instant photography loses out to digital is simple economics. Ignoring the purchase price, the phone in your pocket essentially takes photos for free. Pull it out, take a hundred photos, maybe even of the same thing. Delete them all. Now check your bank balance. One cool thing you may notice is that your little photo excursion cost you exactly zero dollars. While this is great for many reasons, it is a big component of the phenomena mentioned previously. Digital photographs have become so easy to create that they’ve reached a state of inflation; it’s hard to decide what’s actually worth photographing when you’ve fallen into a protocol of, “This could be important I suppose,” click, click, click, click, etc. Though it comes from one of its natural downfalls, instant photography is an interesting cure to this problem. For example, the instant film I use comes out to approximately a dollar per shot, and though that isn’t a whole lot in the grand scheme of things it’s certainly a whole lot more than free. Having a pack of ten photos which each costing a dollar really makes someone consider what they're about to photograph. There’s more double takes. Sure, you could take a photo of the cake, but is the cake photo worth a dollar? Will you be glad you spent a dollar on it tomorrow? Surely the photo of your friends having a great time in the prime of their life has a higher stock. This aspect of instant photography, though draining on the wallet, has the excellent side effect of leaving you with a collection of photos you are almost guaranteed to care about.
3. It Makes Photography Fun Again
Why are these technologies so popular once again? Digital is cheaper, higher in fidelity, practically unlimited and easier to share on a moment's notice. I think one possibility is that my generation has reached an impasse between the technical and emotional aspects embedded in media. When is media no longer about the product, but the process as well? When is the image itself less important than where you took it, and what you went through to take it? I believe that my generation, confronted with digital mediums that encourage instant gratification, has begun to realize that maybe we are missing out on a narrative aspect of media users have secretly craved all along. While taking photos of good quality with your phone is efficient and easy, it’s starting to become banal. Using an instant camera has its quirks, but that’s part of the joy. One embraces the faults, because they are as much a part of the photo as the colors within the frame. Taking an instant film photo of your family on vacation or of your friend at the dance instantly creates a relationship with that photo that digital is simply missing out on. It’s ever so slightly out of focus, maybe a tad over exposed. The colors aren’t perfect, and there’s a darkness around the edges. These flaws however, are exactly why you care about the photo. You messed up a little, but you remember that moment. Instead of being confined to the flash memory of your phone ad infinitum, you create a living breathing object which enthusiastically jogs your memory, “You can’t quite make out their face, but we really enjoyed that concert. It was really just, a great night.”
Sorry, I Got a Little Carried Away
Surprisingly, I did not receive any payment from the instant photography companies to write this article. Though this may be a rather melodramatic piece, considering it’s about cameras that may or may not be toys, which may or may not be a fad, I really do genuinely believe that there is a certain special something about taking photos this way. My particular camera is perhaps a little bit on the embarrassingly expensive side, but as the movement picks up new camera prices are falling, and options are expanding. So go ahead, and give instant photography a shot! (Note: This article ends with a pun, and I am making zero apologies.)
