How millennials keep the film photography culture alive

By: Merissa Alyea Binti Omar Ariff

Analog photography was pioneered by George Eastman, an established philanthropist and entrepreneur who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before transitioning to celluloid in 1888. Eastman’s company introduced and manufactured the revolutionary Kodak camera and offered services to develop the film for their consumers.The key factor that made Kodak so popular was Eastman’s company's marketing strategy that simplified the apparatus and even the developing film process for consumers. In result, photography became accessible to millions of consumers with no specific professional training, technical expertise, or aesthetic credentials.

Analog photography has managed to stay trendy throughout the years, even with the rise of digital photography and millennials are the reason why. Social media platforms such as Tik Tok play a great part in keeping the film photography culture intwine with millennials.

When scrolling through Tik Tok, after getting past the famous Renegade dance trend or various cooking recipe challenges, users will be sure to come across a trend that features Kodak cameras or other brands of disposable cameras on their feed. The popular trend has not been officially named, but the trend follows a similar format where the Tik Tok creators will show their disposable cameras and zoom into it and will then transition to a montage of the creators' developed film pictures taken while upbeat songs such as “You Know It” by Colony House to create a coming-of-age theme to the Tik Tok.

“I have never tried using a film camera before seeing the montage trends repetitively on my Tik Tok for you page (FYP), I decided to buy a Kodak off Amazon to try it out and loved it,” said 22-year-old web development student Farrah Nazmi.

Undoubtedly, social media platforms such as Tik Tok have a massive influence over millennials as a large part of their day to day lives are spent scrolling through these platforms. It serves as an upper hand to historic companies such as Kodak by helping to create more brand awareness amongst the younger generation. Additionally, the trend revolving around the hype of taking photos using film will result in the younger generation being intrigued by it, resulting in more sales for film cameras.

Whilst the surge of interest in film photography remains high amongst millennials, there are still a number of them who are against the hobby as they find shooting in film to be time consuming and expensive. Developing your pictures from your disposable cameras would cost you around RM 15 - RM 20 depending on the film lab you choose to go to. A downside of film photography is that you can’t predict how your photos are going to turn out until you get the photos developed, there is a risk the photos may turn out overexposed that causes the light leaks in the images or the pictures may even turn out to blurry due to the low resolution of disposable cameras.

“When I was on vacation in Paris two summers ago, I wanted to picture my trip using a disposable camera from Fujifilm because my friends were doing it too, when I brought the cameras to get developed, only five pictures out of the 27 shots came out decent. I felt very disappointed and decided that film photography was not for me,” said 22-year-old accounting student Dina Wardah.

Shooting in film certainly has its pros and cons, there are photographers who continue to shoot in film even though they have encountered experiences of their photos turning out not like how they expected because they enjoy the element of suspense film photography brings to the table. Whether or not millennials find themselves consistently shooting in film or it being a one time thing for them, it helps to keep companies like Kodak in production and the film photography culture ongoing throughout the upcoming years.

Image 1: Kodak disposable camera. Source: