ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses the increased readoption of analogue photographic technology by aspirational amateurs in the contemporary digital environment. It argues that this phenomenon reflects the processes of co-constitution of the analogue and the digital, through which the infrastructures, discourses and practices of analogue photography have become imbricated with those of digital media, highlighting how practitioners have increasingly interpreted the reappropriation of film photography as a means to counteract the “dematerialization” process supposedly triggered by the spread of digital photography, and to reaffirm the value of photography as a physical and multisensory experience. The chapter reconstructs the origins of this phenomenon and, in so doing, proposes to interpret contemporary analogue photographic practices as examples of “technological resistance” that are guided by a logic of opposition to digital photography. By analyzing two contemporary analogue practices, lomography and polaroidism, the chapter also shows how the articulation of “resistant” photographic cultures and practices has been grounded in the redefinition of the way in which the camera’s and photographer’s agencies are conceived and relationally bound, as well as in the greater saliency attributed to photography’s materiality in the digital age.
