My personal history with film photography
Nine days after my birth, my father took the first picture of me in my life using his 120-type Tianjin manual film camera. In the photo, the baby version of me was wearing the silver necklace made by my grandfather, and I was in swaddling clothes, the wound on my forehead caused by the birth surgery was not yet healed.
During the 1990s, film cameras along with camera rolls were still luxury items in China. From my parents' memories, at that time, it was a fashion for people to wear new clothes and take family portraits in the photo studio. Therefore, when my father got a domestic-made film camera—spending all of his one-month income—he was so proud of having it and used it to document the precious moments with his family. He was always bragging about his excellent skills in taking photos. I still remember, at that time, all the negatives needed to be taken to the photo studio for development.
The image processing technology at that time was far less advanced than it is now. Everything recorded in the photos was somewhat “authentic.” For each picture taken by film photography, the colors were not as vibrant as the digital ones, the resolution was low, and the boundaries among objects and figures were blurred. Looking at the photos taken when I was 4-year-old or younger, I was always frowning and looking straight ahead. It is like I stared at the camera and thought, "what the hell is this?" Then later, when I was five years old, until I was 12 years old, I was always smiling in the photos. The photos tell how I got along with the camera.
Maybe it was my father's influence. I started secretly taking pictures with my father's camera when I was 6 years old. I still remember the first film camera I touched was decorated with leather. I wondered, “Why does this machine have skin?” Every time I pressed the shutter, I was so excited and listened carefully to the sound of the shutter and the film rolling in the camera. There was a time I pulled the film out and saw a lot of brown-black negatives. I pondered that the negatives formed in the camera were black and dark brown, so how did they become color photos in the photo studio?
I remember that, after the photos were developed and laminated, my mother always put them in a big album. In the album, there was a handwritten sentence on the first page, with a “for 姚龟雀” in the end. “姚” is our family name, “龟” “雀” means turtle and sparrow in direct translation. I asked my mum, “Who is 姚龟雀? ” She said this was the name my grandpa gave me. Because he dreamed of a turtle and a sparrow the night before I was born, I found it so hilarious.
When I started elementary school, around the early 2000s, I noticed that the streets and buildings around me were undergoing rapid destruction and reconstruction. Parks, grocery stores, and the markets I used to visit with friends—the streets I passed by every day for schools—and my family’s favorite restaurants were all destroyed and replaced with brand new but unfamiliar streets and buildings. The friends that were playing with me lost each other’s contact one after the other. This continued demolition and resetting brought me endless unrest, and it was the starting point for me to keep forgetting about my past experiences and everything that was surrounding me.
From then on, every once in a while, I would flip through the photo albums at home and read them carefully. The collection retold my parents and me through the form of storybooks. The film camera was the tool that allowed us to resist oblivion and devastation. These photos helped me remember my grandpa’s appearance, who passed away when I was 8-year-olds. Since the death of my grandmother, relatives in my mother's family have never reunited again. It was the photos that recorded the time when mother’s siblings were still together.
I didn't realize how meaningful the film photography was to me until I saw Beijing Silvermine, an Instagram account that keeps posting abandoned photos from a recycling plant, whose photos are all about daily portraits of and taken by ordinary people, from the 1970s to 1990s China. I was so touched when I saw the hairstyles, clothes, and accessories people wearing in the photos, and those recreational facilities, infrastructures, and household appliances in the photo backgrounds that symbolized the period of transition in China from a communist planned economy to a capitalist market economy. I found the part of me that was forgotten in those nostalgic collections of abandoned pictures.
Those photos remind me that, although China is ruled by oligarchy and centralization; film cameras empowered us to record and depict the personal stories we crave. The photos are not only the archives and mirrors of us—looking at Beijing Silvermine’s collection, they, as a whole, are also the medium that bypasses the homogenization caused by the country’s propaganda and censorship and zoom into each individual and small family. Look, our lives were vivid and colorful, in those years, though the choices of commodity and entertainment were scarce and the space of our voice was compromised, we were living happily in the bitterness.
After I attended middle school, my father continually bought three or more digital cameras. Each camera has higher performance and efficiency than the previous one. Since then, I have never seen the film cameras we used in my early life again. After I got my first iPhone during the time I was in high school, taking photos has become very convenient for me. This accessibility made me never treat photos seriously again as I used to. Many times I would take hundreds of pictures at once, but never browse them twice. As a consequence, there were lots of duplicate photos in my phone album, and I never delete them.
With the increasingly rapid iteration of technologies, the values of photography are getting inexpensive. These days, it is so easy to take a photo using a cellphone, then upload it on social media, such as Instagram. We seldom print out the photos and put them into albums. We no longer believe photos are precious. As the meaning of photos changes, it seems that our lives also become cheaper. Although film photography technology helped us resist forgetting, this technology itself is gradually being forgotten.