Photography — Analogue Revival
Why Millions of People Chose to Make Photography Harder Again
In an era when your phone can take a technically perfect photograph before you've consciously decided to press anything, more people than at any point in decades are loading film into cameras that require them to think.
The Idea
The analogue revival isn't nostalgia dressed up as aesthetics, though it's often dismissed that way. Something more interesting is happening. When you shoot on film, you have a fixed number of frames — usually 24 or 36 — and no immediate feedback. You can't delete. You can't review. You compose, expose, and then wait, sometimes for weeks, to see what you actually made. This creates a completely different relationship between the photographer and the moment. Digital photography is iterative by design. Shoot, check, adjust, reshoot. It's a loop that produces technically better images on average, but it also changes what you're doing cognitively. You're optimising rather than committing. With film, each frame carries a small cost — financial, chemical, finite — and that cost reintroduces something that abundance had quietly erased: consequence. What photographers who've returned to film often describe isn't better images, but better attention. The constraint doesn't just change the photograph; it changes the person taking it. You slow down. You look harder before you raise the camera. You become, briefly, genuinely present in a scene rather than harvesting it. There's a term in psychology — "desirable difficulty" — for obstacles that improve learning and performance precisely because they force deeper engagement. Film, it turns out, is a desirable difficulty built into a machine.
In the World
In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy. The company that had invented the dominant logic of popular photography — the roll of film, the mass-market camera, the idea that anyone could capture a moment — had been hollowed out by the very democratisation it helped start. Analysts wrote its obituary without much ceremony. Then something unexpected happened. Kodak relaunched Kodak Gold 200 in 2022. Fujifilm, which had quietly kept its film production lines running, began struggling to meet demand. In Japan, the Czech Republic, and the United States, small independent film manufacturers started appearing. Lomography, a Vienna-based company that had spent two decades as a niche curiosity, found itself mainstream. By the mid-2020s, film sales had grown year-on-year for nearly a decade — driven not by older photographers clinging to habit, but overwhelmingly by people under thirty who had grown up entirely in digital environments. The photographer and academic Alec Soth, known for his large-format documentary work, has spoken about how the physical weight of his camera — a 4x5 that requires a tripod, a dark cloth, and genuine deliberation per shot — changes the social dynamic of a portrait session entirely. The subject sees the effort. The effort communicates seriousness. Something reciprocal opens up that a phone camera, however technically capable, doesn't easily produce. The tool shapes the encounter as much as the eye behind it.
Why It Matters
The analogue revival is easy to file under "retro trend" and move on from, but it points at something worth sitting with: the relationship between friction and meaning. We've spent decades removing friction from almost every creative and communicative act — faster, easier, more, instantly. And largely, that's been good. But the return to film suggests that some friction wasn't mere inefficiency. It was doing work. This applies well beyond photography. Think about the difference between typing notes and writing them by hand, between streaming a film and owning it physically, between ordering food instantly and cooking it slowly. In each case, the harder, slower version produces a different quality of engagement — not always better output, but often richer experience and stronger memory. If you take photographs — on any device — it's worth asking what your relationship to the image actually is. Are you capturing moments or cataloguing them? Are you present in a scene or processing it? The film photographer's constraint is an artificial one you could choose to impose on yourself even with a digital camera: decide before you shoot, look before you raise it, take fewer. The camera is almost beside the point. What film revivalists are really recovering is a certain quality of attention.
A Question to Ponder
Is there something in your life where removing a constraint has made the activity feel less meaningful — and if so, what would it cost you to bring the friction back?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable