Digital vs analog is nostalgia vs pragmatism

So, does a photograph consist of the image it produces, or does it also consist of the process that made it? Khot says the image is the whole of it. Verma is arguing the opposite. The same question turns out to be sitting underneath jeans, records, and, oddly, cars

Nostalgia works in strange ways. Actually, no one knows what it is or how it works. Consider this: In June 2024, Ricoh announced the Pentax 17. This was the first new film camera from a major manufacturer in nearly two decades. The Japanese launch was planned for late that month. Within two days, pre-orders exceeded the company’s expectations such that it suspended new orders entirely.

Digital vs analog is nostalgia vs pragmatism

Meanwhile, Kodak and Fujifilm had spent twenty years dismantling their silver-halide supply chains. They are now at work to rebuild it. Why? Because interest in traditional 35 mm films has more than tripled since 2020, estimate industry experts. A technology declared dead now faces a supply-chain crisis because there are not enough people around who know how to make it.

When asked about this resurgence, Mumbai-based photo-journalist Vikas Khot recalls shooting on film because it was the only option. But with the kind of cameras and technology now available, he makes the case that whatever people love about analogue images can be reproduced digitally at a fraction of the cost.

His Delhi-based counterpart Amit Verma offers a counter-intuitive argument. The bigger picture, for him, is having his work in physical form, something with tangible weight to it. Images left sitting on a hard drive may never see daylight once he isn’t around to open them. A digital RAW file, he says, is just like a negative. Only the person who shot it knows how to develop it in his own way. Leave behind the data alone, and nobody can recreate the look he might have wanted, but print it though, and it becomes part of his physical archive, outliving him in a form no one needs a password for.

Shridhar Kunte makes an odd messenger for scepticism about analogue’s revival, given how much of his own life runs on precision engineering. He was senior technical editor at Better Photography before the magazine was discontinued. He now builds custom speakers for audiophiles.

He says the demand for analogue is real, and it comes from the “Instagram-driven” Gen Z. What explains the queue for the Pentax then? A small band of enthusiasts who simply priced out everyone else. Such people exist in all niches he claims. Audiophiles whom he caters to, want vinyl back as an object. But few ask whether the chain producing that object still resembles the one that it used to be: most music today is mastered digitally, then stamped onto vinyl afterward. The analogue artefact arrives at the end of a digital process. “Is the record now technically digital or analogue?” he asks.

Denim worked this out for itself years ago, more plainly than photography or music ever has. Levi’s runs a research lab in California called Eureka, where a laser machine does something almost absurdly simple: it photographs a genuinely worn, faded pair of jeans and burns that exact pattern onto a brand-new pair in about ninety seconds. Once upon a time, it used to take a factory worker roughly half an hour per pair. Levi’s now leans on this same laser technology to justify its claim of cutting freshwater use across its supply chain.

Extrapolate the digital argument to automobiles. The current diktat has it that from October 2026, new electric cars, buses and trucks sold in India must emit a sound their motors don’t naturally make; existing models get until October 2027. This is happening in other parts of the world as well. Regulators have decided silence is a hazard. So, BMW commissioned Hans Zimmer to compose sounds for their cars, and Porsche’s Taycan carries an engineered note.

The flip side, says automobile journalist and historian Adil Jal Darukhanawala, is that the safety case itself may be solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Disciplined pedestrians in Europe don’t need a warning because they walk on footpaths. Undisciplined ones of the kinds in India don’t respond to anything except horns. Nobody, Darukhanwala included, will know until the rule is tested out against real traffic.

But that still leaves a question unanswered. If a technology can now reproduce the look, the sound and the feel of a process without the process ever happening, what exactly is anyone paying extra for when they insist on the original? Khot would say: nothing worth paying for. Verma would say: everything that outlives you. Kunte would say: ask that question about a record before you ask it about a photograph. Darukhanawala says that he should be asked about this in 2027.