Why Gen Z is falling in love with film photography
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Children look at developed film in a darkroom during an analog photography workshop held in southeastern Turkey on June 14, 2026.<br>Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images
https://theconversation.com/why-gen-z-is-falling-in-love-with-film-photography-282454
https://theconversation.com/why-gen-z-is-falling-in-love-with-film-photography-282454
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Film photography is experiencing a resurrection, summoned by unlikely conjurers: Gen Z.
It wasn’t too long ago that analog photography – which uses photographic film and chemical processing – was declared all but dead, relegated to the province of niche hobbyists and professional artists.
Digital cameras had taken over nearly all areas of photographic production. Film industry titans like Polaroid and Kodak had shrunk dramatically from their heyday, becoming shells of their former selves. Darkrooms, where students learned how to manually develop and print film, shuttered at high schools and college campuses across the country, replaced by digital labs. For most people, the spirit of analog photography was mainly channeled through Instagram filters.
But within the past five years, younger people have been increasingly drawn to the old way of doing photography.
In 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film camera users worldwide were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 30. The year prior, online searches for analog photography saw a 41% rise.
Disposable camera sales have been steadily increasing since 2023. The photography journal PetaPixel went a step further and announced 2024 as “film’s best year in decades,” as major brands have introduced new cameras in response to renewed demand and revived classic models. More than 30% of respondents to a 2024 Ilford Photo survey on film photography were in the 25-34 age group.
As I’ve witnessed more and more of my undergraduate art and design students embrace analog photography, I’m not seeing this as a trend rooted in a nostalgic yearning for the past. Instead, I’m seeing it as young people rejecting algorithms, breaking free from the alienation of social media and reacting to childhoods spent on Zoom and TikTok – a deliberate move to redefine the future of art, social connection and engagement with the world.
Pining for a ‘third place’
In my work as a historian of photography and lecturer at the University of Southern California, I’ll often ask my students about how they take photos – whether they’re using digital cameras their smartphones or analog devices.
This year, for the first time, some of my students discussed images they’d printed and the physical photography albums they’d put together of their friends and family. They talked about how they’d also been sending postcards, writing letters and tacking photographs to their bedroom walls.
New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby snaps a photo with a disposable film camera during the team’s victory rally on June 18, 2026, after winning the NBA Finals.<br>Craig T. Fruchtman/Getty Images
I couldn’t help but think about how so much of the language tied to early social media seemed to refashion physical gestures for a virtual world – “posting” on a “wall,” “poking,” “tagging” and “bookmarking,” not to mention “friending.”
This was a rhetorical move by social media companies, likely designed to help people feel as though they were in a familiar terrain of social connection. Yet the underlying business model of these platforms depended more on maximizing engagement and advertising revenue than on nurturing authentic relationships.
Everyone knows what happened next: The more connected young people became online, the more isolated and detached they started to feel. The COVID-19 lockdown pushed social life online even further, and researchers are only now starting to see how the combination of increased screen time and isolation negatively affected adolescents’ mental health. By 2023, 51% of American teenagers reported they spend at least four hours a day on social media.
I see the attraction of analog photography as a response to life lived through screens, a pathway toward community engagement and the desire for what sociologists call “a third place.”
Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” third places are meant as a space separate from home and work. They offer a reprieve for the in-between, generating the conditions needed for creative cross-pollination. They might include a local cafe, a neighborhood writing group, a weekly Magic: The Gathering game or a college fraternity – any space that allows for social interaction and personal growth.
These spaces also combat loneliness. They get people out of their heads and into a community. Oldenburg also referred to them as “havens of sociability,” places or gatherings where people can...