Nostalgia for now
Why is faux-vintage photography so popular?
In the past couple of years, thanks to photo apps Instagram and Hipstamatic, social media sites have been over run with a new type of image: the faux-vintage photo. Their filters allow users to re-style their digital, often iPhone pics, as ‘analogue’ through the superimposition of over-saturated colours, blurred edges and low depth of field. Harmless fun, no doubt- but why are filters that emulate almost obsolete forms of technology like the 35mm film and Polaroid camera so popular these days?
Wired contributor Clive Thompson, writing about the ‘Instagram effect’ explains that these apps have the power to transform drab, mundane pictures into ‘emotionally vibrant’ images; the underlying assumption that analogue photos possess a quality of emotional depth or vibrancy is hardly questioned. Kazyn Varnelis, writing about network culture, in which the subject is less an individual and more a product of multiple overlapping physical and social networks, argues that these filtered photos “allow individuals to reframe their lives around moments that seem more authentic”. He suggests that an inability to find a temporal grounding in the present drives us to locate it in a past understood to be somehow more solid and ‘real’, attributing this pervasive feel of unanchored drift partly to the dematerialization of money that the abolition of the gold standard in the early 70s ushered in. Once money was freed from its bondage to the value of gold, a material good, capital became pure value and mutated into the global network of fluid, immaterial capital flows which shape our current existence.
In an essay for the Cyborgology blog on the subject, Nathan Jurgenson argues that their worn-out patina, alluding to the passage of time, as well as the gritty surface, faded colours and Polaroid style rounded borders are signifiers of a materiality only an analogue photo possesses. This tangible quality is inscribed in analogue photos, since, as theorists like Rosalind Krauss have explained, they have an indexical relation to the object captured, being a product of light reflecting off it and reacting with photosensitive chemicals in the film. A photo thus bears a trace of the object, which perhaps explains the authenticity or realness people feel they embody. In the quest for an ‘authentic’ look, however, the images end up looking the same, so that the process of documentation itself becomes their true subject; they are aware of themselves as documents. Fellow 2010LAB.tv author Duncan White, at a talk at the Chisenhale
Jurgenson believes that ‘social media users have become always aware of the present as a potential document to be consumed by others’, which has ingrained the practice of self-documentation, of endlessly recording our lives for public display. This habitual documentation creates a confusion between what is ‘now’ (present) and what is ‘past’ (which is what documents refer to), so that the present is experienced as already a past to feel nostalgic for. What is important is that what is lived, seen and felt is documented; it’s the recording of the experience that gives it reality, depth and meaning. Perhaps these photos hold out the possibility
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