What goes around comes around. I was the dinosaur on school trips with my cheap, bright blue disposable camera, instead of any new or flashy family digital that took more than 27 pictures and let you see your image straight away. My mother had deemed me too brash and careless to be trusted with such up-to-date technology. Still does, really.
Now the disposable has made a come-back. The evidence is all over Facebook. What I thought desperately uncool in the prime of my youth (did I really just type that? Should I laugh or cry?) is now everything that appeals about the developed disposable: the insufferably fashionable grainy quality that David Bailey pioneered with Jean Shrimpton in 1962; and a vulnerable exposure that makes even the most bland subject matter suddenly deep and interesting (see all pictures below). However, let's face it, you can do all that shit with an iPhone these days. I, for one, managed to rack up £25 in the cost of developing these little antiquities. What's causing the resurgence?
My reckoning is Time. The waiting. And retrospection. Vintage is cool, didn't you know. And our generation in particular are culprits, perhaps, of over-digitizing our own lives. We don't wait for anything, we document everything - and broadcast our most intimate moments at their time of conception for the whole world to see. Instagram and Snapchat, etc, etc, etc. The moment isn't valued unless everyone knows we're doing it. It is catapulted into the virtual stratosphere and then lost amongst millions.
With the disposable, suddenly things are left to chance. There is something alluring and childishly exciting in picking and choosing 27 precious snapshots of time. Waiting days, weeks, months to see the outcome - and when the camera works, the flash remembered, the momentum of scatalogical movements just the right match ... a memory resurfaces. Time, truly, captured. There is something refreshing in reverting back to basics: no photoshop, no filter - just a rawness that, when it works, surpasses any other beauty.
Amsterdam, Croatia, Portugal, London:
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