Last spring, Anthony Tabarez threw the prom like many high schoolers today: dance the night away and capture it through photos and video. The snapshots shows 18-year-old Tabarez and his friends grinning, jumping around and waving from a crowded dance floor.
But instead of using his smartphone, Mr. Tabarez recorded the prom night with the Olympus FE-230, a silver, 7.1-megapixel digital camera manufactured in 2007 and formerly part owned by his mother. During his senior year of high school, cameras like this started popping up in classrooms and at social gatherings. On prom night, Mr. Tabarez handed over his camera, which took the same fuchsia-colored photos as the first ones.
“We were so used to our phones,” says Tabarez, a freshman at California State University, Northridge. “When you have something else to shoot, it gets more interesting.”
Generation Z’s childhood cameras, considered obsolete and pointless by their original owners, are at popular again. Young people are reveling in the novelty of an old look, touting digital cameras on TikTok and share the photos they produce on Instagram. On TikTok, the hashtag #digital camera has 184 million views.
Modern influencers like Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid and Charli D’Amelio are encouraging fun and mimicking their early 2000s counterparts by taking blurry, over-bright photos. Instead of paparazzi posting these photos in tabloids or on gossip sites, influencers post them on social media.
Most of today’s teenagers and young adults were infants at the turn of the millennium. Gen Z-ers grew up with increasingly all-in-one smartphones, making standalone cameras, mapping devices, and other gadgets superfluous. Now they are looking to get rid of their smartphones; Last year, 36% of American teenagers said they spent too much time on social media, according to the Pew Research Center.
That respite came in part from compact point-and-shoot digital cameras, discovered by Gen Z-ers who were rummaging through their parents’ trash drawers and shopping second-hand. Camera lines like the Canon PowerShot and Kodak EasyShare were among their finds, appearing at parties and other social events.
Over the past few years, the nostalgia for Y2K . eraa time of both tech enthusiasm and existential fear that spanned the late 1990s and early 2000s, attracted Generation Z. Nostalgia has pervaded TikTok, fueling fashion trend alike low-rise pantsvelvet tracksuit and skirt over jeans. Shopping mall brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and Juicy Couture have reaped the benefits; in 2021, Abercrombie reports peak sales network since 2014. Now, Y2K is nostalgic for the technology to capture these outfits when they were new.
This time, the poor image quality is not due to a lack of better tools. That is the purpose.
Compared to today’s smartphones, older digital cameras have fewer megapixels, capture less detail, and built-in lenses have higher apertures, allowing less light, both of which contribute produce lower quality images. But in a more or less standard feed of smartphone photos, quirky photos taken with digital cameras are now seen as treasures rather than reasons for deletion.
Mark Hunter, a photographer also known as Cobrasnake, said: “People are realizing how exciting it is to have something not attached to their phone. “You are getting a different result than you were used to. There is a slight delay in satisfaction.
Mr. Hunter, 37, captured the nightlife of his early years with his digital camera. In those photos, celebrities – including the “You Belong With Me” period Taylor Swift and just famous kim kardashian — looking like normal partygoers, caught in the harsh light of Mr. Hunter’s camera.
I take pictures now a group of influencers and new stars, but the photos would be almost indistinguishable from his old photos if his subject was clutching a flip phone instead of an iPhone. They’re rewinding the clocks back to 2007 and “basically reliving every episode of ‘The Simple Life’,” he said, referring to a reality TV show from the time that featured the actor. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
However, many new point-and-shoot digital cameras come with bells and whistles these days, and older models have been discontinued, so people turn to thrift stores and e-commerce websites. old age to find a camera with a classic enough design. On eBay, searches for “digital camera” grew 10% between 2021 and 2022, with searches for specific models even increasing, said Davina Ramnarine, a company spokeswoman. more soaring. For example, searches for “Nikon COOLPIX” have grown by 90 percent, she says.
Zounia Rabotson’s earliest memories are traveling and posing in front of monuments and tourist attractions when her mother presses a button and a digital camera works. Now a model in New York City, she’s back with her mother’s digital camera, the 2011 Canon PowerShot SX230 HS.
On Instagram, Ms. Rabotson, 22 years old, posts grainy, overexposed photos of her wearing denim miniskirts and carrying small chic handbags. She says she’s admired models since her childhood and that taking pictures in a similar style makes her “feel like them”.
“I feel like we’re getting too picky,” she said. “Going back in time is just a great idea.”
Ms. Rabotson did not completely disconnect. She showcased her camera on social media, her fourth most popular caption videotapes on TikTok: “Pov” — opinion — “you love digital cameras again.”
On TikTok, teens and young adults now show off cameras that are close to their age and explain how to achieve “new aesthetic.” Cameras are not always well received. After influencer Amalie Bladt posted a videotapes on TikTok telling viewers to “buy the cheapest digital camera you can find” to “take overexposure photos”, some of the more than 900 commenters reacted in horror.
“NO NO NO NOOOOO PLEASE NO, I CANNOT CREATE THIS AGE,” one person commented. “I swear I’m not that old.”
But the comments of desperate millennials and those with more modern tastes were dwarfed by comments where users tagged their friends and asked how to download photos from digital cameras. onto their smartphone.
Brielle Saggese, lifestyle strategist at trend forecasting firm WGSN Insight, said that for some Gen Z-ers, digital cameras have become popular because they look more authentic online. not necessarily because it is no longer using the Internet. “Photos taken with a digital camera can impart ‘a layer of personality that most iPhone content doesn’t have,'” she said.
“We want our devices to quietly blend into their surroundings and not be seen,” says Ms. Saggese. “The aesthetic of Y2K changed that,” she added, describing selfies in front of a mirror and those in which a digital camera is a visible accessory. is “style choice”.
Rudra Sondhi, a freshman at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, started using her grandmother’s digital camera because it seemed like a happy medium between film camera and smart phones. He estimates that he takes one out of every five photos with his smartphone’s digital camera.
“When I look back at my digital photos” – from his real camera – “I have very specific memories attached to them,” says Mr. Sondhi. “When I look at the camera roll on my phone, I almost remember the moment and it’s nothing special.”
Sondhi, 18, shares photos taken with his digital camera on a private Instagram account, @rudrascamera. These photos capture the range of young adulthood, from lounging around in college dorm rooms to binge-watching The Weeknd’s performance. When he took out his camera, his friends immediately considered the moment special, he said.
For 22-year-old Sadie Gray Strosser, using a digital camera marked the beginning of another phase of life. She took a semester off from Williams College during the pandemic and started using her parents’ Canon Powershot camera. Her photography Instagram account@mysexyfotos, cataloged nights out and long walks in blurred, low-contrast snapshots.
She said: “I feel very lost and it almost goes hand in hand, using a camera that is not connected to the phone.
When her digital camera broke last summer, Ms Strosser said she was “very upset”. Then she started using her grandmother’s Sony Cyber-shot, which had “a very different feature”. In the meantime, she said, if her iPhone breaks, I couldn’t care less.
