Ours appears to be a digital age. Everywhere we go, our lives are mediated through digital devices.

Our images, our sounds, our voices, our memories are taken and transformed into one selfsame language of binary code: ones and zeros. Zeros and ones. It is a marvel of human genius and technology that we can accomplish so many variegated things through this one irreducible mode of on and off. Off and on.

Complexities are built upon this basic, atomistic, binary block system: programming languages, file types, patterns of organization from one thing into seemingly everything. And as we push further into the digital age, the technologist and futurist question of further digitalization is recurrently raised: Can we become digital ourselves? Can we, contained in flesh-and-blood bodies which sicken and become hale again yet will inevitably die, escape our crude physical limitations and turn our very selves into an eternally preserved sequence of ones and zeros? Ons and offs?

In this moment, then, we have special occasion to step back and take stock of the sweep of our technological tides. Do they advance ever onward, sweeping land back into an ocean of atomic progress? Or do the tides of progress ebb and flow, push forward and then retreat back? Does technology engage the world in a dialogue or a stentorian lecture?

Our society’s understanding of technology is usually a Whig history, a story of one accomplishment built upon another, inexorably improving, potentially pursuing ultimate perfection. Yet the arts are giving us an opportunity to reconsider that assumption with their own evidence, as artistic mediums we once thought lost are now experiencing marked recoveries in their marketplace fortunes. The analog, long since seemingly surpassed by digital successors, is being rescued from history’s obscurity and organically rehabilitated into a reborn time of growth.

In 2022, total vinyl record sales exceeded compact discs for the first time since the 1980s, measured by unit. By revenue, vinyl had surpassed its supposed successor years ago. And while it is beyond question that the overwhelming majority of personal consumption of music takes place digitally, currently through streaming services, it is also beyond questioning that vinyl records and players are being bought at increasing rates, not decreasing ones.

What is especially curious is that this recovery of an older technology does not mean giving up advances in quality made over the decades. The older technology is in fact the superior one. A vinyl holds a complete waveform of the recorded sound, each tone having an analogous point in the record’s groove. Digital audio files, on the other hand, are essentially sophisticated summaries of this original sound. They take it and use an algorithm to identify the most recognizable parts, then effectively erase the rest in order to save room, producing a CliffsNotes of each piece of music that a computer can read and relay back to our ears well enough. This serves the goal of portability well, but necessarily compromises on the conveyance of music. Now small industrial fortunes are being invested on the premise that there will be continuing and even growing marketplace demand for the purchasing of music that has been carved into grooves on black vinyl discs.

And not just for sounds, but so too for pictures! Photographic film, the use of photosensitive chemical emulsions to preserve the impression of whatever light they are exposed to, experienced a precipitous collapse at the start of the twenty-first century. Digital chips that could summarize images into binary code grew into a near-peer competitor to traditional chemistry and also brought with them massive leaps in convenience as their images’ instant availability empowered new workflows.

Larson Harley, who oversees the photo labs at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, remembers that when he entered college for photography in 2002, his program only required one course in digital photography. By the time he graduated four years later, that same program was only requiring one course in film photography. As demand fled to cameras with chips and sensors in place of spools and sheets of film, the complex infrastructure supporting photographic film started to contract and collapse.

And yet that industrial freefall, too, has found its floor and begun to rebound. A decade after Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy, its executives report that “consumer demand, particularly for 35mm film, has exploded over the last few years. Our retailers are constantly telling us that they can’t keep this film on their shelves and they want more.” Likewise in the United Kingdom, Ilford Harman, long known for its lines of black-and-white photographic film, has just released its first ever color film, an entirely new chemistry that represents a clear expansion for the company.

The rebound of film can perhaps most clearly be seen on what is literally the largest screen. The 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer was filmed entirely on large format film, while using special effects that were almost entirely executed physically in the real world. It was captured in large part on 70mm IMAX film, and occasioned the creation of the world’s first ever black-and-white IMAX film, invented by Kodak specifically for Christopher Nolan’s use in this movie. When the film made its debut in the pop-cultural phenomenon of “Barbenheimer,” its screenings sold out immediately and for weeks, and its theatrical run was repeatedly extended.

After a decade of Marvel dominating the theatrical box office with CGI-driven digital blockbusters, director Christopher Nolan and studio Paramount went to great lengths to communicate to the public the formats that the movie could best be seen on, and they emphasized 70mm IMAX as the true pinnacle. As cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema explained, true 70mm IMAX film, despite being invented in the 1970s, is still the highest quality medium humankind has developed for recording moving images. While directly comparing digital resolution with film detail is perilous, Hoytema judges IMAX film to record at a resolution of roughly 18K (true HD being defined as 2K, and the current state of the theatrical art for most cinemas being 4K). Reports were then made of people making pilgrimages across states to watch Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX. Nolan’s fellow blockbuster director Denis Villeneuve has credited the success of the Oppenheimer film showings directly with his ability to convince Warner Brothers to invest in creating 70mm IMAX prints of 2024’s Dune: Part Two and distributing them across the world. And now IMAX itself is bringing to market an entirely new generation of IMAX film cameras to meet this demand and facilitate this work.

Ricoh Pentax, the company responsible for a camera that launched millions of student photographers over the decades, the Pentax K1000, is likewise commercially responding to the resurgence in consumer demand for analog products. On June 18, 2024, Pentax launched a brand new consumer film camera, the Pentax 17. To achieve this return to film, they invested not just in pulling blueprints and technical schematics out of their archives, but also in reaching out to their retired engineers who had mastered film camera production, and bringing them back in to consult their current engineers and transmit the tacit knowledge of how to mechanically make a good film camera – knowledge that would naturally escape a generation of camera engineers who built their careers on digital sensor construction.

Amid this moment of rebirth, for some analog producers in 2024 the pain and the fear of potential re-failure haunts any look toward the future. They fear that the rebound will bounce too near the sun, that this seeming renaissance will turn out to be but a fad and a too-cruel tease. That once the current supply-demand imbalances are leveled out, their market will have to once again reset amid crushing overcapacity. Larson Harley stands amid the overbooked classes of black-and-white film photography he oversees at ICP, and he cherishes the interest pouring into his art and his school. But he reflects that he has “seen too many close calls, seen what the end could look like too many times. I’m happy to bathe in the light of this community right now.”

Some of those most passionately attached to these older ways of doing things are the young who are discovering what they never had access to in the first place.

Those of us with more critical distance might more easily ask the essential question: What good does film offer photography that explains this revival? What are the genuine goods that make it worthy of investing so much human attention, energy, and craft? What makes it more than just another fad of the retro, if more indeed it is?

Fundamentally, film is still physical. Film photography and cinematography are products of reactions between light and photosensitive chemistry capturing reflections of the original light bounced off the actors on set or the subject being photographed. When Nolan’s cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema wanted to articulate to home audiences why Oppenheimer was shot on film, he explained, “Our guiding objective was to avoid putting a digital filter in front of the audience.”

The analog is information embodied in the world, read and transformed entirely physically, without going through the transformation of digital compression. The subject is not broken apart and summarized in binary code, rendered as a series of simple zeros and ones that can be reassembled into something recognizable by a computer trained in its file format.

No, the film photograph is a physical object. Hold a film negative up to a light and you will see an image inverted. Hold a positive slide up to a light and you will see what the photographer peering through the camera’s lens saw, as preserved in the film’s emulsion. Like a painter working in oils or acrylic, Harley observes, in film photography one cannot help but make a physical object. The product of one’s artistic labors exists here in the world to be encountered by physically embodied souls, that is, by living human beings.

Yet in her book On Photography, one of the most famous critical discussions of the art, Susan Sontag began with the scathing declaration that “humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” Sontag summons the imagery from one of the most famous philosophical investigations of truth and justice, the allegory recounted in the ancient Greek work The Republic. In it, Plato conjures an image of bound and chained captives at the bottom of a cave, who having lived their lives entirely in that cave, have no experience of the light of day and the world above. Shapes are paraded past a fire kept behind these immobile captives, casting shadows on the wall, and the captives have no reason to suppose that the reality extends any further than these shadows. To Sontag, despite one of the medium’s oldest sobriquets being “painting with light,” photography merely produces the shadow on the wall of the cave, keeping its observers trapped, perhaps idly entertained, but most of all separated from reality up above.

As Sontag was writing in the 1960s, photography was on one of its biggest upswings. Cameras evolved to simplify the process of taking a photograph from a complex technical exercise to a push-button point-and-shoot. This popularization of simplified picture-taking exploded the image-making act into the hands of millions and ultimately billions roaming their world with cameras to memorialize the mundane and their leisured excursions. Today that same habit is found, in digital form, as now cameras follow people everywhere all the time, embedded into marvels of compact digital technology known, almost anachronistically at this point, as smartphones.

To capture a photograph on film now, in the age of the smartphone, must be a more conscious choice. Whether it is done by the snap of a 35mm disposable camera, or the massive contraption of an old-fashioned looking and wooden large-format view camera, capturing on film in 2024 requires choosing film.

Choosing is likewise inherent to the vinyl record revival of the current moment. Daniel Powers, head of operations for Nashville Record Pressing, one of the largest vinyl manufacturers in the United States, reflects that one of his favorite things about his company’s product is that, while he can and does listen to streamed music everywhere he goes, listening to a vinyl record requires intentionality and physical presentness: he must sit down in front of a record player and put a physical record on it; he must be in the place and attend to the music.

This seems to be near the root of the analog renaissance: physicality, and its necessary connection to embodiment. Living in a digital age, where options and capabilities so often seemingly approach infinity, the analog connects to our unique human condition of being embodied souls: capable of participating in the infinite while necessarily being rooted in the particular. Here our arts encounter us where we cannot escape by a click, and they linger before us, unregenerately.

The film photographers of today, then, seem to be painting on the walls of Plato’s cave. They are not captives, bound up to watch the shadows dance, but rather active participants in, and creators of, the imagistic exercise. And the increasing numbers of individuals who sit down to spin a record in order to hear their music are not chained captives either, but active participants in their art’s consumption.

Like humanity’s first painters, those Paleolithic cave artists who decorated the walls of their natural shelters tens of thousands of years ago, today’s artisans of the analog are directly translating meaning onto the physical world. Unlike those painterly pioneers, who wrangled technology to newly serve their creative and documentary purposes, today’s analog artists are consciously choosing to recover a way of working in the world that dignifies their nature as embodied souls.

Here we can ask what lessons this story holds for those who stand athwart other tides of history, urgently whispering “stop.” If the inevitability implied by the common Whig theory of technology can be revealed to be subject to conscious human choosing after all, how else can we invest in such recovering?

First, we should guard against the assumption that interest in the old is limited to the old. Here, some of those most passionately attached to these older ways of doing things are the young who are discovering what they never had access to in the first place. As with arts, so with liturgies!

A more sobering lesson might be to manage our expectations for the likelihood of institutions making it to the other side of a collapse and recovery unchanged. Digging into even the largest institutions engaged with photographic film, histories of bankruptcies and restructurings are very frequently found. George Eastman’s Kodak was chopped up and spun off several times before reaching the present point where it could pioneer Nolan’s black-and-white 70mm IMAX film. Before Ilford/Harman could forge into the world of making new color chemistries, they went through their own restructurings in the United Kingdom.

Importantly, though, those institutions were spared full liquidation. Their value proposition was preserved alongside their institutional knowledge and fundamental capabilities, so that they might still exist when conditions evolved to once again make use of them.

As with organizations, even more so with people. These recoveries are taking place within generational memory of their prior practices. When Ricoh Pentax decided to investigate designing a new film camera for the first time since the turn of the millennium, they reached out to their retired engineers for help interpreting their archival diagrams and technical specifications. These conversations led to retaining critical pieces of machinery from the old schematics that the current generation of engineers had thought seemed vestigial and amenable to being streamlined out of the mechanics.

Likewise, vinyl manufacturing collapsed but did not vanish. And when the rebound in demand hit, there were enough skilled technicians still around to furnish new establishments and transmit their knowledge forward to a new generation. The lesson to be learned, then, seems to be to take care to preserve and continue practicing those things you value. Whether an art, a liturgy, or an understanding of marriage, we can take responsibility for practicing what we literally preach.

We should look for the good that compels a practice’s adherents to preserve the flame even when the end seems enevitable. For analog arts, that seems to be essentially tied up with their physicality.

While Daniel Powers observes that at least some of the records being produced today seem intended more to be decor than used immediately as playable discs, he also notes the painstaking attention to detail and quality control that his factory’s audio engineers wring out of every product of their presses. For even if a record is mounted on a wall for a year, or a decade even, it will always preserve its audio in its physical etchings, and thus will stand ever-ready to be scratched by a turntable’s needle and pour forth its sonic treasure.

And as Ricoh Pentax prepared its new film camera for market, it said that one of the only parameters that became clear quickly and remained a constant was their choice to incorporate a mechanical film winding lever. They felt the continued practice of this art would require a design feature that tied directly to the physical embodiment of the operator, even if an engineer might point out how much more quickly, accurately, and efficiently an electronic winding motor might get the same job done in the moment.

Human nature as embodied soul stands reassuringly unchanging, even as the humans themselves will change and change and change. Here, now, amid the rebirth of the analog arts, we can take assurance in our future’s essential connection to our nature. And then we can choose to resume painting the walls of Plato’s cave, with light.