We Don't Even Like Perfect
A friend of mine recently inherited a large record collection. What does one do when confronted with the influx of over 1,000 records? Start by playing one, surely.
That’s exactly what my friend did, and what she told me about experience was familiar. She had never heard of the band, was only vaguely sure of what genre to expect, but she listened to the record and liked it!
How many of us, when instead confronted with a functionally endless list of records on Apple Music, would bother to listen to any one of them, let alone give it an earnest chance of finding its way into our lives? Personally, when I face an excess of choices, I gravitate to what I already know well.
Older generations love to wax nostalgic about how records were expensive and how that investment and the scarcity it created forced them to develop a greater appreciation for what they might not have enjoyed on first spin.
If it wasn’t the expense, then at least the simple investment of time and intentional effort might be enough to endear you to a record. Skipping tracks is a fiddly and an imprecise endeavor on wax, and something about re-housing a record mid-play to get a new one feels wrong.
Begrudgingly, I’ll admit that the old farts may have a point. Something is lost when the process becomes too easy or disposable.
Digital photography might be the most consequential technological advancement so far this century1. Having a high-quality camera in our pockets at all times has profoundly changed the way we interact with the world.
A dedicated digital camera still produces far better results than a phone, and I suspect that no amount of software trickery will ever close that gap2, but at the same time, the phone’s ubiquity has irreversibly cheapened all photographs. We take pictures of receipts, tracking numbers, shoe sizes that fit, and other mundane things we want to remember — such things that would have never warranted a frame of film in times past.
While the usefulness is unmatched, people have been feeling that cheapness — photographs that are infinite in number and endlessly repeatable are inherently less valuable. Again, when confronted with an effectively endless supply of photographic media to consume, why spend much time on any one photo? Especially true when the oligarch who runs the photo-sharing platform designs the business model of that platform around the photos being both disposable and infinite.
Film, on the other hand, is ruthless. It demands patience, contemplation, persistence, preparation, and practice from the photographer, but it also rewards its adherents with images that have an indefinable quality of specialness. That’s precisely why people have been returning to film for more than a decade now.
Much like digital music is more perfect than vinyl records, digital photographs are far more perfect than film negatives. But humans don’t actually like perfect. We are messy beings who live our lives in messy ways, and film reflects human life in a much more human manner. That imperceptible quality that makes the “film look?” That’s just the imperfection, and it makes our messy monkey brains happy.
Much like my friend who gave her random record a chance, when I shoot a roll of film, I’m far more endeared to each photograph because of the thought and effort I put into it. Even the bad ones take a little more contemplation to dismiss. I often find myself returning to the images every few days to see if my opinions have solidified, in much the same way I do when a new record from a band I follow is released.
Film, like vinyl, will wax and wane over the coming decades, but it won’t fade away entirely3. As so much of the world becomes reduced to buttons on screens, interacting with the physical world in a physical way will always be desirable — at least, to some of us.