Victorian Visual Culture

I, like many others this past year, have hopped onto the trend of disposable film cameras. Armed with my Fujifilm Quicksnap in hand, I marched around the streets of my hometown and clicked away at anything I could find. Photo albums quickly filled up, mimicking the books of printed out digitals my parents made of my childhood. Most of the time it is nothing but mindless fun. But taking this class has made me wonder why, in fact, I and so many people are now drawn to these cameras.

There is the obvious: it is a physical, tangible medium. Each click feels like a memory taken down and noted, whereas on my phone it feels fake. The colors on my screen could be as fickle and vague as the images I hold in my mind. When I unwrap the package of developed photos, it is a sort of transformation: the immaterial has been made real. A magical, physical testament to my experiences and life. There’s a stability to that kind of thinking.

Yet this sentiment doesn’t feel totally honest. I could print out the pictures on my phone if I wanted to. But the blurry, off-color quality of the disposable camera is its greatest appeal. It harkens back to a time before I was even born, when film cameras dominated the field. I take pictures to copy a feeling that I myself have only ever experienced in other photographs. It raises the question: why do the style of old photographs feel more authentic than modern ones?

I come back, then, to the discussions of photography’s truth claims. It is easy to see that the thousands of images in my phone gallery are not representative of my life — I know the story behind them. But when we are taken out of that context, suddenly it is not so hard to believe in the narrative of the photo. To buy into the fact that maybe there did exist a simpler, happier time, and that that nostalgia can be recreated.

I will still keep using my silly little cameras. They bring a new joy to an activity that has become routine. But if even the very first Victorian photographs were not as truthful as we pretend, then maybe it is time to investigate our need to reclaim older media and technology as merely another performance.