Originally Posted by
Ulophot
Hi, Tom-Thomas. As you may have seen from my recent thread relating to this subject, I see it rather differently. There are always fads, of course, and this certainly has a large component of that, as your anecdotal observations illustrate. One can view many of the countless YouTube videos/channels on film photography and infer the same. (I don’t visit Facebook, TikTok, or other so-called social media, so I don’t have much to say about them. I don’t watch TV either, but that’s another story.) However, there are other components to the picture, of a more serious nature, and time will tell how far or extensively they may take hold among a certain percentage of enthusiast photographers internationally.
My view of the overall situation involves more than I can go through here. I would suggest, however, that a confluence of economic and social factors has been heading for quite some time toward an major cultural inflection point, at which matters may turn one way or another. One such direction would be a new appreciation for the reality, that we human beings need a number of physical things to meet our needs, including food, clothing, shelter, energy sources, and so forth, and that a need exists to return to certain standards for their production and organization. Such a change relies on policy issues that lie outside the purpose of this forum, so I will not say more on them here.
The nascent, natural increase of concern during the past decade and more, over this physical basis of our existence, I believe, is part of what informs at least the more serious of those finding, or returning to, film photography, whether they are conscious of it or not. As I mentioned in the other thread, one hears a clear refrain among many such enthusiasts, voicing an enjoyment of slowing down, participating in the craft, anticipating the results, and valuing the physical products, i.e., prints. I don’t believe it to be confined to photography. I hear similar voicings among educators at all levels, as well as among people in all sorts of professions who have tired of the shallowness and blitz factors of the media barrage in general and are finding pathways involving more of an investment of their intellect and deeper emotions.
There are certainly generational differences at play, yielding the kinds of behavior you have witnessed and reported. Again, I think it would be inappropriate for me to say too much about that in this forum. In any case, I think there is reason for more optimism than might arise from your observations.
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