Contrary to popular thought, traditional film-based photography is not utterly annihilated by digital but has been thriving in recent years. At least that is the situation among New York City trenderatti artist-photogs profiled here by filmmakers Alex Contell and Tommaso Sacconi. Shutterbug viewers with rosy memories of loading their old Nikon SLRs or fiddling to get the roll film lined up in a Rolleiflex twin-lens classic will still take heart from this celebration of analog imaging reborn as cutting-edge.
We meet celluloid-film buffs such as tireless experimenter Driely Carter (beware the profanity from that young lady, though), Leica-toting street shooter Andre Wagner, and Natalie Hail, a master of the retro-art of wet printing in the darkroom. They are part of a vibrant and growing "community" of analog photographers in NYC and other major cities (action here stays mostly confined to New York, however), and that furthermore, the cloistered conditions of the COVID lockdown actually made more people take up 35mm film photography as an avocation. Some here are shown using their vintage camera gear to document the George Floyd protests.
Being limited to a roll of 36 shots (even less for other yesteryear film formats) makes an image creator think differently, taking time to compose, plan or even just improvise and be surprised by what develops. Interviewees say is the flaws and idiosyncrasies (AKA, "grain") that vitally distinguish film imaging from the bland computer perfection of hundreds of lookalike high-resolution JPEG files on the typical digital-camera data card.
There are even practitioners of "Lomography," the use of poorly manufactured (usually Russian) and/or very rudimentary film cameras that can still take interesting and transfixing pictures - often by chance or malfunction.
Will this persuade the average viewer to abandon the iPhone to take pictures and dial back evolution 50 years to laboriously use a mechanical Pentax or unwieldy view camera? Maybe not, but the joy of photography depicted here (sometimes for galleries, sometimes, paradoxically enough, for internet social media) is palpable and contagious.
Nitpickers might note there is little or no acknowledgment of the many pictorial effects that can be done with darkroom, light-sensitive paper, and enlarger, sometimes using no camera at all.
What public library shelves would this title be on?
Art shelves should want this one for the family album.
What academic subjects would this film be suitable for?
Photography and visual art are clearly in the viewfinder.
What type of classroom would this documentary resource be suitable for?
Enthusiastic profanity might have fetched an R-rating for the material. Surprisingly, given the avant-garde milieu, erotic visual subject matter and nudes are not much of the Big Picture. College and above.