Lomography

 https://www.fastcompany.com/3048509/how-an-analog-photo-company-can-thrive-in-an-instagram-age

How An Analogue Photo Company Can Thrive In An Instagram Age

At one point, they almost built their own mobile photography app. But instead, Matthias Fiegl and Sally Bibawy decided to stick to their company’s old-school roots. Lomography, a 23-year-old camera company headquartered in Austria, has remained loyal to the art of analog and experimental photography since the beginning, when it first discovered–and then helped popularize–the quirky Lomo LC-A film camera in a shop in Prague. After weathering the onslaught of both digital cameras and the smartphone explosion, Lomography has managed to carve out a durable–and profitable–niche doing things the old-school way: hashtag, no filter.

In an age when hinging one’s business on film and analog optics might sound like a death sentence, Lomography has not only survived, but it’s managed to establish itself as a classically artistic yet hipster-beloved brand with products sold in Urban Outfitters and other major retailers. If you think the mission of the company–encapsulated in its motto, “The future is analog”–sounds counterintuitive, the details of how Lomography evolved to this point are no less unconventional: Along the way, they’ve defied business conventions, encouraged rule breaking, and even, at one point, got a helping hand from none other than Vladimir Putin.

“In the end, you cannot do the same things with mobile phones, because they have different optics,” says Fiegl, who started the Lomographic Society with his wife, Bibawy, and longtime friend Wolfgang Stranzinger in 1992 when they were all art students in Austria. “On your phone, you can design your shot afterward. With analog, you shoot and then a few days later you see the result. It’s a different artistic process.”

“When photography was invented, people thought painting would die,” Fiegl says. “Painting had the role of documenting things. And then photography came. What happened? Painting completely changed and became much more creative. People started to change colors and paint more abstractly. That’s like what we’re doing.”

Lomography, which became one of the first photography brands to have a presence online when it launched a photo-sharing website in 1996, could have easily carried its digital-friendly strategy into the smartphone era. But instead of building an app of its own when Instagram and Hipstamatic started stealing its thunder among photo hobbyists, the company doubled down on analog.

The company’s products also have a certain appeal among photography and art students, Bibawy tells me. “The understanding and the theory of photography comes from analog,” she says. “If you start with a digital camera, you will definitely miss a big part of the theory behind it.” Just a few years after many universities shut down their film darkrooms, Lomography is seeing renewed demand for its products among educators and students alike.

https://www.lomography.com/magazine/335803-the-10-golden-rules-of-lomography-simple-use-film-camera

The 10 Golden Rules Of Lomography

1. Take your camera everywhere you go

2. Use it any time - day and night

3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but a part of it

4. Try the shot from the hip

5. Approach your subject as close as possible

6. Don't think 

7. Be Fast

8. You don't have to know before hand what you captured on film

9. Or afterwards

10. Don't worry about any rules

Notes:

- Lomography is a camera company started by Matthias Fiegl, Sally Bibawy, and Wolfgang Stranzinger in 1992. It began with the trio of art students finding the Lomo LC-A in Prague, which they then helped popularise around the world after falling in love with it's flaws. 

- Characteristics of Lomography cameras include light leaks, grain, over-exposure, coloured flash, and all-round 'flaws' within film photography. 

- The company produces cheap and easily accessible, easy to use cameras in order to spread awareness about how easy and fun photography can be - for example, their 'Simple Use Film Camera'. As well as this they also sell cult classics such as the camera that started the phenomenon - the Lomo LC-A, and other favourites like the Diana and Holga. 

- Despite becoming increasingly popular within recent years amongst 'hipsters' and art students and even being stocked in retailers like Urban Outfitters, Lomography as a company are straying away from anything digital. Discussions about producing an app did happen, but with so many competitors such as Instagram back in the day and more recently HUJI, the company decided to focus on promoting the analogue side of things, stating that true Lomography can not be replicated on an iPhone due to the differing optics. 

Masterclass: Complete Guide To Film Photography

 https://www.masterclass.com/articles/complete-guide-to-film-photography

What is film photography?

- Film photography is the art of taking photographs on thin, transparent strips of plastic we call film. One side of the film strip is coated with a gelatin emulsion that contains small silver halide crystals, which determine the contrast and resolution of a photograph.

How does film photography work?

- Silver halide crystals are light-sensitive. The more light they’re exposed to, the brighter and less detailed the photograph will be. When a film camera takes a picture, the camera lens briefly exposes the film strip to an image that’s being magnified through the lens. This exposure burns an imprint into the emulsion and creates what’s called a latent image. Once captured, that latent image can be developed into a negative, which can, in turn, be projected onto light-sensitive photo paper to create a photograph.

What is 35mm Film?

- When you hear someone referring to 35 millimeter film (often abbreviated to 35mm), this is the most commonly-used film gauge, which describes the physical width of the film strip. Photographer Oskar Barnack, the inventor of Leica cameras, introduced the 35mm format in the 1920s. Photographic film is separated into small- and large-format depending on the size of the image that the film is used to produce. 35mm film is considered small-format because it produces images that are just 36x24 mm in size. This differentiates it from large-format, which produces images that are 102mm x 127mm, and medium-format, which produces images between 24mm x 36mm. The term “35mm” is also used to refer to cameras that shoot exclusively 35mm film. Camera companies that make 35mm cameras include: Leica, Kodak, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Fujifilm, and many others. 

What is the difference between Film Photography and Digital Photography?

- Analog cameras use physical film to capture images. Digital cameras capture digital images which are then kept on storage cards. Analog photography requires photographs to be chemically developed, while digital photography produces instantly viewable images.

5 Advantages of film photography

- Analog photography offers more involved, hands-on opportunities to learn the principles of photography.

- Analog photography keeps you focused on the discipline of the art and forces you to shoot more critically.

- Analog photography is rewarding. Successfully loading, shooting, and developing a roll of film takes time and equipment, but it’s a process that many photographers find extremely satisfying—particularly when it comes to working in the darkroom.

- Analog photography encourages photographers to be more thoughtful. Since rolls of 35mm film can only capture a limited number of pictures, every shot counts.

- Analog photography can produce artistic effects like overexposures, vignettes, and light leaks.

Film Photography Can Never Be Replaced

 WIRED article by Jonathon Keats:

https://www.wired.com/story/film-photography-can-never-be-replaced/

Image: Ryan Segedi

When Polaroid abandoned instant film in 2008, a 39-year-old fan named Florian Kaps showed up at an event commemorating the shuttering of the last factory and convinced the company's production manager to join him in making their own product. Kaps' film company, Impossible Project, was so successful that it eventually bought the Polaroid brand name and branched out to make instant film cameras as well.

In 2012, Kodak discontinued Ektachrome, its popular 35-mm slide film. But a nascent audience of shutterbugs drove the company to revive Ektachrome five years later; Kodak's film business saw year-over-year growth of 21 percent in 2018.

Today dozens of first-rate films are readily available at your local Walmart, including Kodak's traditional black-and-white Tri-X 400, Fujifilm's versatile Fujicolor Pro 400H, and, of course, the newly reissued Ektachrome. Buying these films by the cartful, hip designers now tote around cheap Lomo and Holga cameras, relishing the lens flare and light leaks. And then there's Shane Balkowitsch, a Midwestern nurse who never picked up a camera until he saw the spectacularly detailed images made on glass with wet-plate collodion photography, a labor-intensive process used by photographers before roll film became available in 1888. After mastering the essentially obsolete technique, he's made portraits of celebrities, including one of Greta Thunberg in which she appears to be a visionary time traveller.

The long tail of archaic technologies is normal. Some people still use typewriters and phonographs, never buying into their replacements. Others, like Balkowitsch, fall for old-school methods when they discover communities of committed antiquarians.

Yet more than mere legacy is needed for an outmoded technology to become popular. The standard explanation for retro trends, which has been used to account for the return of vinyl records and analog film, is that the future is coming on too fast. And as much as rapid-fire advances seem unavoidable, the arts can provide a refuge. Nostalgia is a balm.

Just look to the plethora of digital filters that make your shots look like film. The Huji Cam app purposely corrupts perfectly exposed smartphone pics with simulated light streaks (and a faux 1998 date stamp). The more sophisticated VSCO emulates the color gamut of dozens of films, many out of production, so you can set your phone to capture a shot with the high saturation of Agfa Ultra 50 or the soft skin tones of Kodak Portra 150NC.

But as closely as software can imitate a vintage rig, and as well as it may hide the fact that you're shooting on an iPhone 11, people still crave the real thing. Digital simulations don't satisfy us, and that points to a deeper reason for analog's persistence.

Smartphone photography is fast and easy because it's aided by algorithms. Although skill still matters, the number of variables involved in taking a photo has been engineered to a minimum. That can make digital photography feel cold and artificial, and the digital photographer more like a tool than an artist. Those filters we add, then, personalize pictures that are generically exact already. The algorithms that tweak colors or fake a lens flare let you be imperfect, but only in a perfectly calculated way. Your phone still pwns you.

The popularity of analog photography can be seen as a reaction to this pwnership—and a manifestation of anxiety that most everything we do is executed by software intermediaries that make decisions on our behalf. Like our smartphone cameras, our Echos and Teslas try to second-guess our desires, as do the social networks where we post our photographs. We're not in control and not fully genuine.

Analog photography is dignifying because it's out of the hands of the algorithms, which means it affords you the freedom to make your own mistakes. Suffering the consequences of human error is paradoxically liberating, and a great picture can provide a rush equivalent to winning a marathon.

A couple of years ago, when Huji was released, Time asked photographer Stephen Shore what he thought of digital filters. He dismissed them as gimmicks, remarking that a photograph “is good because of the decisions the photographer makes.”

Notes:

- Film photography is accessible to us today because of the people who are passionate about it, like Florian Kaps. Companies will always move on to the next big thing, in this case digital photography. Enough people we're passionate enough about Kodak's film Ektachrome that they managed to get it produced and sold again. 

- Film photography, much like vinyl, is popular due to the ever increasing rate at which society is developing. Digital technology is advancing so quickly that it has caused the recent surge of nostalgia popularity. 

- Not only that, but the film photography specifically has become more popular due to a disliking towards fast and easy smartphones that use algorithms. Using film is a much slower process and allows for more mistakes. 

The Nostalgic Film Photography of Ian Howorth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgKQ7yXCXxg

Notes: 

Ian Howorth is a documentary photographer from Brighton. He worked in TV, but found it very rushed and didn't like the lack of care and attention that was put into it. Photography became an outlet that was a lot of fun. He was creating a lot of cinematic pieces. "It was almost about creating a moment that you would envision in a film."

He would see a location that would inspire him to make something, and he could do that with a very low budget using film photography. He talks about transitional moments with 'pockets of light'. Moments with movement, like a walking scene in a film. There is no story, just capturing something like a pretty introduction. 

He likes images with feeling, and he doesn't like words. He wants the images to speak for themselves. Raw emotion - the right people will feel it. He talks about that moment when you get butterflies, when you know something is going to be incredible. A moment when you feel like you're in a movie set, when it feels like something has been put there for you to photograph it. 

Although he doesn't seek it, his images are all bound together with a sense of tranquillity, and also alone-ness. Personally, I see it as a stand-off-ish-ness. Howarth's images to me have a very waiting room quality about them. Like a transitional place. He says - there's no bustle around you, it's peaceful, like an empty space that you fill. 

Although his images hold this sense of 'isolation' he sees this as negative, and likes to view it more as quiet contemplation. I really resonate with this because I think that it links to the idea of why nostalgia makes us so happy. Nostalgia is definitely a theme within Howoth's photography and he uses it in a comforting way - in a way that allows you to take some time to quietly contemplate. "There is a nostalgic feel to my images. It's almost at the core of me, I'm just not interested in modern things. Older things look better now, they just seem like they're better built."

Why does he shoot on film?

"After years of looking at scans and negatives, it's just something that you see and you go: 'I like that'"

Reflection: 

Although I have never studied photography and know very little about the technicalities, I really resonate with Ian Howorth's work and see him almost as a creative inspiration. After watching his interview, I found that I really agreed with the way that he sees the world, especially when he was discussing the nostalgia within his work and why this is something that he is drawn to. I think that I like his work because of how comforting it feels. Because a lot of the city where I am from is old and hasn't been modernised, looking at some of Howorth's photographs feels like I am looking at home, and triggers happy memories. 

Images: 

Images

Chosen Interest: Film Photography

I also have some scans of my own film photos that I began taking in January last year. I've kept it up as a hobby because I really enjoy doing it, but I only do it for fun and don't take it too seriously. My main goal when taking photos is usually to capture memories, so they often feature my friends and surroundings. One of the things that I love about taking pictures on my film camera is that sometimes when I take a picture of someone they'll come over to me and say "let's see it then", and when I tell them that they have to wait until I get the film developed they're shocked. 

Interest / Images

Chosen Interest: Film Photography 

The following images are a small selection of scans of my mum's photographs. She took these throughout her twenties and they feature my brother as well as herself and her friends. I love looking through my mum's old photos because the nostalgia makes me happy. Also, I am currently the same age that my mum was when she was taking the photos but our lives are so different, so looking through them makes me reflect and think about how things have changed so drastically.