The pictures below and over the page were made in 2021 whilst Maleko and I were on an afternoon poodlewalk in the littoral zone in Waitpinga in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia. We often walk along this section of the coast in the late afternoon. Photographically speaking, this littoral zone works best in low or flat sunlight. It is no good in the bright afternoon sunlight of summer.
The pictures were made with my Leica M4-P with a rigid Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens. As mentioned in an earlier post the rangefinder recently became salt damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing. Leica in Germany have since informed me that the lens is kaput (ie., unrepairable), but that they can repair the camera body. I have given the go ahead to repair the camera and I am hoping that the insurance will cover most of the cost of buying a second hand Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens.
That decision means that I remain committed to what some call vintage photography that many understand in terms of being wrapped up in nostalgia. Though not born into a digital world, but subsequently embracing it, I accept that I am a nostalgic photographer whose optimistic belief in the digital future is becoming outmoded. What then is analogue nostalgia?
That analogue photography remains in a digital culture goes against the grain of those photographic discourses that repeatedly proclaim that film is dead. Thus prices for Leica's rangefinder film bodies and lenses have risen (doubled?) and this ongoing increase, presumably, is due to the renewed interest in film photography amongst digital natives.
How then can we understand the renewed interest in film? Is the current resurgence of film a backlash to digital photography? Or is it more what Laura Marks termed analogue nostalgia? The latter expresses itself as the resurrection and restoring things how they used to be, and which emanates from a dissatisfaction with the continuing process of digitisation.
Nostalgia is a combination of nostos—the return home—and algia—longing. As a historical emotion it is coeval with modernity since nostalgia and progress are doubles and mirror images of one another. Though nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, it is actually a yearning for a different time. Since the various nostalgia's speak in riddles and puzzles it is important to ask the question: Who is speaking in the name of nostalgia?
What then is the dissatisfaction with the ongoing process of digitisation. In her book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002) Marks held that analogue nostalgia expresses a ‘desire for indexicality’ and ‘a retrospective fondness for the “problems” of decay and generational loss that analog posed (p.152). She argued that the analogue nostalgia phenomenon is less about the refusal of digital technologies, but exclusively about the digital remediation through incorporating analogue aesthetics.
This remediation--ie., a correcting something that is deficient -- is a recovery of an aesthetics that reasserts imperfection, flaws and mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades a digital culture. This is how the aesthetics of analogue photography is reframed by a digital culture.
In The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym distinguishes between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia: “Restorative nostalgia”, she writes, “manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time” (41). In other words: restorative nostalgia represses the passing of time, while reflective nostalgia revels in it. An analogue aesthetics in a digital culture is a reflective nostalgia.