In 1975, one of Kodak's own engineers built the first digital camera and took it to his bosses, who looked at a machine that might eat into film sales and decided the safest thing to do was bury it. It buried them instead, and Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Fourteen years later, it's making money selling the thing it tried to protect.
The detail that stopped me is that back in March, Kodak announced six new film stocks, three in colour and three in black and white, and it's making and distributing them itself rather than leaving film to somebody else to look after. There's a new Kodak film camera going around too, cheap enough that it feels disposable even though it isn't, although that one is built by a licensee rather than Kodak proper. Either way, the company digital nearly wiped out is back in business selling film, and the numbers say this isn't a stunt.
I should say up front that I'm exactly the wrong person to feel misty-eyed about this. My clearest memory of film is a 30-shot disposable camera on school camp and the low-grade panic of knowing every frame counted, so I'd stand there frozen, terrified of wasting one on a bad photo. I wasted plenty anyway, because my finger made it into the corner of at least five shots on that roll, which is a strike rate I've never quite lived down. Then digital arrived, the fear went with it, and I never once missed the stress of taking a bad photo. Which is why it's so strange to watch people my own age walking back toward the exact thing I was relieved to get rid of.
It isn't nostalgia
The easy explanation, and the one I half-believed myself, is that we're all just raiding our parents' cupboards and calling it vintage. But when I went looking, the numbers didn't back that up. Wholesale orders for film are up 127% since 2020, more than 300 new film labs opened around the world last year alone, and when Ilford surveyed 14,000 film shooters across 110 countries, 71% of them said they'd shot more film that year than the year before. That last one is the number that matters, because it isn't people trying film once for the novelty, it's people doing more of it the longer they stay. And my crowd isn't remembering a golden age, because we barely caught the tail end of film before digital swallowed it whole. We're choosing it now, on purpose, which is a very different thing from missing it.
This isn't really about photos
What everyone seems to be chasing isn't 2003, it's the feeling of doing one thing at a time. A roll of film gives you 36 shots and charges you for every one, so you can't fire off 40 and sort it out later, because you have to look at what's in front of you, decide it's worth a frame, and press the button knowing that's one of your 36 gone. That isn't people putting up with an annoying limit, it's the whole reason they're there.
Your phone does the opposite, and it does it for free, which is exactly the problem. It'll take 400 photos of the same sunset and then bury every one of them in a camera roll you never open, and I've got a bit over 5,000 photos on mine that prove the point, because when I checked last night I couldn't have told you what was in more than about six of them.
Excluding the five hundred or so of George. And yes, this was taken on film.
Here's the bit I keep coming back to. Endless choice was meant to set us free, but what actually happened is that when something costs you nothing you stop choosing, and when you stop choosing you stop paying attention. It's the same reason you can scroll a streaming app for twenty minutes and go to bed having watched nothing, because it isn't that there's nothing on, it's that there's too much on and picking has quietly become the hard part. So a limit turns out to be worth something, since it makes you choose, and choosing makes you actually have a view. Take the limit away and you don't get more freedom, you just get a longer list and a flatter feeling.
It's happening everywhere
Vinyl did this first, and everyone called it a phase for about fifteen years before giving up and admitting it wasn't. Records are slower, dearer, and worse in every way you can measure than a streaming app, and people keep buying them anyway, because putting a record on is a decision and pressing shuffle isn't. The dumbphone is the newer version of the same idea, with people handing back a device that does everything for one that only makes calls and sends texts, doing it on purpose and then telling everyone they've done it. Somewhere in the last couple of years, owning deliberately worse technology stopped being odd and started being a bit of a flex.
Being fair about it
A lot of this could be nonsense, and it's worth saying so out loud, because some of it is plainly showing off. Film is expensive and developing is expensive, and plenty of this is people with money to spare buying a look that, let's be honest, photographs beautifully on the very app they claim to be escaping, and half those cameras will be on Marketplace by Easter. Choosing to have less is also a lot easier when it's actually your choice, and a phone that only makes calls is charming when it's your second phone and grim when it's your only one, because going without has always been more fun when you can afford to stop. But people are still handing over real money for less, and whatever the reason, that's not nothing.
Where this goes
My guess is that being told what you can't do slowly starts turning up as a selling point, and you can already see it in venues locking phones in pouches at the door, in schools doing the same, and in apps that now sell you a focus mode to hide the features you paid for. There's a decent chance the next decade of gadgets competes less on what they can do and more on what they politely refuse to do. Kodak nearly died because it was too slow to let go of film, and it's back because it never quite did.