Why Are We Turning to Analog?

In a world that moves too quickly, film feels like a pause. A camera that gives you thirty-six frames is not a limit but a way of listening again. You lift it to your eye, measure the light, and trust the moment. There is no instant review, no algorithm waiting to sharpen or brighten what you see. The image will come later, slowly, as it always did. The image of this blog is the sunrise at Radnor Lake, shot with near infrared 35 mm film.

Working with film makes time almost dilate. The rhythm is unhurried: loading and processing the film and finally watching shapes appear on paper in the darkroom. It asks for attention, and in return gives a kind of quiet honesty. The process is imperfect and personal, and that imperfection is what makes it feel special.

There is also something freeing in using tools that are not connected to unknown places. No notifications, no hidden systems making choices for you. The act of creating becomes private again. Analog technology allows you to be yourself without being managed or measured by something else.

This return to the physical is happening in many places. People are listening to records again, making prints, buying used books. Even inside large digital companies, artists have started to reclaim slower forms of making art. At Facebook’s Analog Research Lab, designers step away from screens to print and experiment with paper and ink. This shows that not everything has to be digital and that there is a need to connect to tools in a more organic way sometimes.

While some of us had the time to transition from analog to digital, younger people might have missed the analog era altogether, and so they feel a gap by diving directly to our connected digital world. This is why they are the majority who is claiming analog as a personal media and identifying with it in a new way.

And then there is the story of Polaroid. When instant film production stopped in 2008, a small group refused to let it vanish. They bought the last factory and rebuilt everything from memory, naming it the Impossible Project. Years later, Polaroid returned, not as nostalgia but as proof that care and persistence can bring lost things back into being.

Analog work is less about turning back than about turning inward. It gives shape to time and leaves space for thought. When someone loads a roll of film, they are not chasing perfection or efficiency. They are letting an image find its own pace, and leaving a bit of chance to the final result that makes their art unique and personally special.

The Elektryxx Photo comics series I was entirely shot on near-infrared film