Like almost all fashions, that of developing analog photos is born with a certain subversive air: in this case towards the immediate. As Cristóbal Benavente, co-founder of Silver Salts (Calle Lope de Vega, 15):“ten years ago our public was older people, generally nostalgic for analog photography, but for the last couple of years they have been young people who have grown up with digital cameras and cell phones”
One only needs to take a stroll through Instagram to see that even supermodels with 75 million followers like Gigi Hadid have an alternative account dedicated exclusively to analog photos it does. While in TikTok, videos are going viral comparing the same site photographed with analog and digital, and thus has managed to revive a business that ten years ago seemed to subsist only for a small niche. At Interphoto (Calle de Cartagena, 158), a photographic laboratory that has been located in the Prosperidad neighborhood for 38 years, explains:“we have seen a resurgence of analog photography, since in recent years our sector was going through very distressing moments inherited from the last crisis of 2008. A lot of film has also been shot again in the field of fashion and auteur photography.”
but what has again attracted people to take pictures without seeing the result? In a way it could be compared to the return of vinyl, with that mix of the romantic, the alternative and the search for a lost quality. But in addition to analog photography, there is also the part of experimentation, and even the search to do something manual.
How to get started in photography
Although newcomers to this art can be divided into two groups: “there are people who want a compact camera to take beautiful photos and then view them in digital format, and people who are looking to learn, who generally prefer to start with a reflex camera,” explains Cristóbal Benavente of Sales de Plata. In the first case, we could assure that it caters to the fashion derived from social networks, but there is also the hobby part, the more social part. This is a major factor for spaces such as Cash Loses (Calle del Carnero, 15), where they recycle film, and try to make it more accessible by reducing costs, hold workshops to make EcoCam -cameras made of sustainable materials- and hand-positivate. Lab 35 (calle de Manuela Malasaña, 35) is also one of the few laboratories where the chemical processes of manual developing and copying are still used.
With 35% of customers being newbies, according to Interphoto, guiding these new amateurs is essential, and almost a must due to the amount of technicalities involved in getting started in photography. So it is common to have to queue up in stores like La Peliculera (Calle de Argensola, 2) because of the number of people interested in cameras, especially second-hand ones, types of film and different formats with which they can be created. That’s why both here and at Sales de Plata, they have courses for those who want to go deeper – they even repair broken cameras.
In the next step, experimentation, there are laboratories such as 1826 Film Lab (14, El Escorial St.) in Malasaña the program can be used for different results such as cross-cutting, black and white slides or making modifications to color processes, among others.
Thus, with this resurgence of the analogical that coexists and adapts to the digital, mythical stores such as Photocasion (calle de la Ribera de Curtidores, 22), in El Rastro. And at the same time, projects such as Contado Pierde emerge, which do not follow the commandments of the present, but their own, and which reflect one of the great attractions of photography: the lack of rules.