Flipping through an old photo album, you find photos from a summer family outing to the Bronx Zoo from your childhood. One fuzzy photo captures three-year-old you scooping melted Dippin’ Dots into your smeared mouth by the sea lion exhibit, your eyes wide in awe of the blubbery creatures. A couple pages later, you find a vivid photo from your fourth birthday, eyes glimmering in delight and gummy smile wide open. In the yellowish lighting, your grandmother beams beside you, laughing at your messy handling of the spoon.
These memories, among others, might not have made it into the chambers of your mind. But as you cruise through the glossy pages, saturated photos invigorate memories from your childhood that were once forgotten—all thanks to your parents’ retro-quality digital camera. Scrolling on your Instagram feed, you might catch a glimpse of accounts dedicated to digital camera photos—precious galleries of memories frozen in time. Yes, some might seek the vintage aesthetic of the photos for social media, but an alternate reason for using these dated cameras exists.
“The photo quality [of my digital camera] reminds me of my childhood. When I take pictures on my camera, they can be blurry; in some places you can’t really see what’s going on. Moments from my childhood are also like that,” said sophomore Riya Thawani, who utilizes her parents’ old camera to capture memories. The low-quality, dreamy appearance of these photos may physically resemble memories we hold in our heads. While re-emerging Y2K trends are popularizing the vintage aesthetic of these gadgets, they also offer a nostalgic revival of our past.
“We lost a lot of our middle school years when COVID hit and because of that, we’re trying to make high school feel more like our childhood again,” said Thawani, “In everyone’s mind, childhood comes to an end when you enter college.” We teenagers today might feel we missed out on childhood opportunities, mainly as a result of the months of socialization and activity lost during the pandemic. With college and adulthood rapidly approaching, adolescents may feel that this time is the last chance to live carefree and preserve memories that will last a lifetime. Digital cameras grant us a separation from screens: a healthy distancing after a period of isolation heavily dependent on modern technology.
Operating a camera is a manual procedure—with the click of a button, the flash beams forward and a mechanical snap sounds, briefly freezing the screen before resetting. So why purposely carry a separate camera when smartphone cameras have evolved to have such capable abilities? Sometimes, we utilize our smartphones to take quick, convenient photos. Other times, we use our smartphones to take dozens of shots of the same subject, desperate for the perfect photo worthy of a social media post. But digital cameras are associated with memories that are important enough to retain—memories that you will look back on in the future. They offer an intimate glimpse into your life, capturing the raw feel of everyday moments. When we look back on photos in the years to come, the times when we lived in the moment will be the ones we remember.
As our generation navigates through the ever-changing stages of life, digital cameras serve as a constant reminder of our past. These keepsakes encourage us to pause and take in the moment, because life only happens once.
