Confirmation comes time and again. Film refuses to die.
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 traveler.
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 unavoida