The immediacy of image-making today just kind of bums me out sometimes. We take and share so many more photos than we used to, but I suspect algorithms hold more influence over what images we see and what we shoot than our own inner voices. We correct what we don’t like with a click or an AI prompt, and post something more perfect than reality, but perhaps less evocative.
Like everyone else, I have thousands of photos on my phone I’ll never look at again. But when I shoot film, I contemplate the scene in front of me. I wonder if it’s worth spending the frame, I think about what it makes me feel. The shutter clicks, and it can be weeks before I know if the emotion I felt in the moment is captured by the resulting image. And the mistakes? I can’t fix them. The overexposure, the lens dust, the halation, those are forever part of the photo. Sometimes, they’re what makes the photo.
I’m not tech adverse by any means, but in an era of my life defined by overstimulation and a false sense of urgency, I wanted to ask: What if I made my digital feed analog?
So welcome, my friend, to my analog blog.
— B