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The cameras of Generation Z's youth, regarded as dated and pointless by their original owners, are back in style. Digital cameras are being promoted on TikTok and Instagram by young people who are enjoying the novelty of an older look.
Author Kalley Huang celebrated Anthony Tabarez's prom like many other high school students today last spring: taking pictures and videos of the night as you dance and enjoy it. From a crowded dance floor, Tabarez, 18, and his friends can be seen smiling, bouncing around, and waving their arms.
However, Tabarez used an Olympus FE-230, a silver digital camera with 7.1 megapixels that was manufactured in 2007 and was previously owned by his mother, to document prom night rather than using his smartphone. Similar cameras began to appear in his high school classrooms and at social events during his senior year. On the night of the prom, Tabarez passed around his camera, which took pictures with a fuchsia tint that looked like they were taken in the early aughts.
Tabarez, a freshman at California State University, Northridge, stated, "We're so used to our phones." It's more exciting when you have something else to shoot on.
The cameras of Generation Z's youth, regarded as dated and pointless by their original owners, are back in style. Digital cameras are being promoted on TikTok and Instagram by young people who are enjoying the novelty of an older look. The hashtag #digitalcamera has received 184 million views on TikTok.
Modern influencers like Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Charli D'Amelio are encouraging people to have fun by taking blurry, overlit photos that look like they were taken in the early 2000s. Influencers are sharing these images on social media rather than having the paparazzi publish them in tabloids or on gossip websites.
At the turn of the millennium, most teenagers and young adults today were infants. As a result of growing up with smartphones, Generation Zers no longer require standalone cameras or other devices. They now want to get away from their smartphones; According to the Pew Research Center, 36% of teenagers in the United States said they spent too much time on social media last year.
Gen Zers who are going through the junk drawers of their parents and shopping secondhand are finding that respite in part through compact point-and-shoot digital cameras. The Kodak EasyShare and Canon Powershot are among their finds, appearing at parties and other social gatherings.
The Y2K era, a time of both technological enthusiasm and existential dread that spanned the late 1990s and early 2000s, has seized Generation Z over the past few years. This nostalgia has spread across TikTok, fueling fashion trends such as dresses over jeans, velour tracksuits, and low-rise pants. Brands like Juicy Couture and Abercrombie & Fitch, which have thrived in malls, Abercrombie and Fitch reported its highest net sales since 2014 in 2021. There is a Y2K-era nostalgia for the technology that made these outfits so popular in the first place.
This time, a better tool is not the cause of the poor image quality. It is deliberate.
Older digital cameras have fewer megapixels, which means they capture less detail, and built-in lenses with higher apertures, which let in less light, which means they produce lower-quality images when compared to smartphones of today. However, in a feed of photos taken with smartphones that are pretty much the same as any other, digital camera imperfections are now seen as treasures rather than reasons to delete them.
Mark Hunter, also known as the Cobrasnake, a photographer, stated, "People are realizing it's fun to have something not attached to their phone." You are not getting the same outcome as before. The feeling of satisfaction comes a little later."
Using his digital camera, 37-year-old Hunter got his start documenting nightlife in the early aughts. In those pictures, celebrities like Taylor Swift from the "You Belong With Me" era and Kim Kardashian, who is now famous, look like regular partygoers caught in Hunter's harsh light.
He now photographs a new group of celebrities and influencers, but if his subjects were holding flip phones rather than iPhones, the images would be nearly identical to his earlier ones. He said, referring to a reality television show from that time, that they are rewinding the clock to 2007 and "basically reliving every episode of 'The Simple Life.'"
However, due to the fact that older models of point-and-shoot digital cameras have been discontinued and many newer models come equipped with modern features, thrift stores and secondhand e-commerce websites are the primary sources of cameras with sufficient vintage appeal. According to company spokesperson Davina Ramnarine, searches for "digital camera" on eBay increased by 10% between 2021 and 2022, with searches for specific models experiencing even steeper increases. She said, for instance, that searches for "Nikon COOLPIX" increased by 90%.
Zounia Rabotson's earliest memories involve her mother pressing a button on a digital camera while she traveled and posed in front of landmarks and tourist attractions. She has returned to her mother's 2011 Canon PowerShot SX230 HS digital camera, which she uses as a model in New York City.
Rabotson, 22, posts grainy, overexposed photos of herself carrying tiny luxury handbags and wearing denim miniskirts on Instagram. She claims that the models she admired as a child inspire her to take photos in a similar style, which makes her "feel like I'm them."
She stated, "I feel like we're becoming a little bit too techy." It's a fantastic concept to travel back in time.
Rabotson doesn't completely disconnect. She has captioned her fourth most popular TikTok video, which features her camera, ", on social media: "You fell in love with digital cameras again," is the point of view, or Pov.
Teens and young adults now demonstrate how to create a "new aesthetic" on TikTok by showing off cameras that are nearly as old as they are. There are times when people don't like the cameras. Some of the more than 900 commenters expressed horror after influencer Amalie Bladt posted a video on TikTok in which she advised viewers to "buy the cheapest digital camera you find" in order to achieve "the over exposure look."
One person made a comment, "NO NO NOOOOOOO PLS NO, I CANNOT RELIEVE THIS ERA." I promise I'm not that old.
However, the responses from users who had tagged their friends and inquired about how to transfer photos from their digital camera to their smartphone outweighed those from depressed millennials and others with more contemporary tastes.
According to Brielle Saggese, a lifestyle strategist at the trend forecasting company WGSN Insight, the digital camera has become popular among some Gen Zers not necessarily because it is a break from the internet but rather because it appears more authentic online. She stated that photographs taken with digital cameras can convey "a layer of personality that the majority of iPhone content does not."
Saggese stated, "We want our devices to quietly blend into our surroundings and not be visible." She added, "The Y2K aesthetic has turned that on its head." She referred to photos in which digital cameras are visible as accessories and mirror selfies as "stylistic choices."
Rudra Sondhi, a McMaster University freshman from Hamilton, Ontario, started taking pictures with his grandmother's digital camera because it seemed like a good middle ground between smartphones and film cameras. He estimates that for every five photos he takes with his smartphone, he takes one with his digital camera.
Sondhi stated, referring to his actual camera, that "when I look back at my digital photos," "I have very specific memories attached to them." I sort of remember the moment when I look through my phone's camera roll, but it's not special.
On a separate Instagram account called @rudrascamera, the 18-year-old Sondhi posts pictures taken with his digital camera. These pictures show the spectrum of young adulthood, from having fun in a college dorm room to moshing at a Weeknd concert. He said that his friends immediately consider the moment to be special when he takes out his camera.
The use of digital cameras has symbolized the beginning of a new phase in Sadie Grey Strosser's life, who is 22 years old. During the pandemic, she took a semester off from Williams College and began using her parents' Canon Powershot. In washed-out, low-contrast photos, her photography Instagram account, @mysexyfotos, documented outings and long drives.
She stated, "I felt so off the grid, and using a camera that wasn't connected to a phone almost went hand in hand."
Strosser stated that she was "so upset" when her digital camera broke last summer. She began using her grandmother's Sony Cyber-shot, which she described as having "such a different character," later on. In the meantime, she stated, "I couldn't care less" if her iPhone broke.