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Lomography, an analog company surviving in a digital world

From the death rattle of companies like Kodak to the popularity of apps like Instagram that transform cellphone snaps into vintage-looking works of art, amateur film photography seems destined for the graveyard of obsolete technologies. Yet, Lomography, a company and organization that champions the use of analog film photography, has found a foothold in a rocky market.

Lomography got its start 20 years ago in Austria, by a group of ambitious photographers and artists who stumbled across a cheap Russian camera called the Lomo that used 35-millimeter film. The Lomo produced charming photographs that often contained artsy blurry streaks and were oversaturated with color due to the camera’s body design and construction.

Matthias Fiegl, one of the artists who went on to found the company, would smuggle the cameras back from Russia to Western Europe in the early 1990s and sell them among his friends and then host exhibitions to celebrate the art photographs.

The company cultivated a following of niche users who liked the funky effects the camera lent the final prints, and it managed to maintain that appeal despite the rise of an on-demand world where each moment is documented, tweaked with a filter and uploaded to the Web. “Instant photography is covered by digital cameras and the iPhone,” said Mr. Fiegl. “You want to share a photo of something right now, you are covered. But our version of analog is different because it’s fun and unexpected, you don’t know what’s coming and you won’t, for a few days or a week, when you get the pictures back.”

I want to buy one !
Source: www.lomography.fr

“You want to share a photo of something right now, you are covered. But our version of analog is different because it’s fun and unexpected, you don’t know what’s coming and you won’t, for a few days or a week, when you get the pictures back.” Matthias Fiegl.

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Source: YouTube

Film photography can never be replaced

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.

Source: Pixabay, brenkee

Old-fashioned photos reveal the passion and grit of surfers

World Oceans Day is June 8, and Proof is celebrating all week. Help us honor our oceans by sharing a photo on Instagram tagged #NatGeoOceansDay, and stay tuned for the editors' picks to appear on our website.
When it comes to worshiping the ocean, surfers are some of the world's most passionate devotees.

Sometimes I make a photograph of a [surfer], and once it’s processed, it has this feeling that this person was the first person to ever walk that place on Earth. I call it the ‘first man’ photo."


It was this fervor that drew photographer Joni Sternbach to make portraits of them. "I was more drawn to the idea of people who were wholly absorbed by the ocean, both physically and metaphorically," she says. "I was captivated by it too, but from the other side, the shoreline."
But Sternbach isn't your average photographer. She works with alternative analog processes, specifically wet plate and tintype photography, which were popularized in the 1850s.

Source: Pixabay

"I learned the wet plate collodion process at about the same time I began my 'Ocean Details' series," she says. "I just got hooked on this beautiful process on blackened metal. The clincher for most people, and me included, is the immediacy of wet plate (think Polaroid of yesteryear) and the amazing image quality from the hand-poured emulsion and vintage brass lenses. Once I understood the limitations of the process, I realized that it was more of a question of finding a subject matter to suit the medium, not the other way around."