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Outline

The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography, in Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, Katarina Niemeyer (ed.), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan (Memory Studies), 2014, p. 51-69.

https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375889_4

Abstract

With the advent of photographic apps for mobile devices, nostalgia found its own visual paradise. Gil Bartholeyns explores the emergence of ‘instant nostalgia’ as a new practice originating in 2009–2010, and advances the concepts of self-induced and biographical nostalgia. By emulating analogue photography of the 1960s–1980s (the square frame or the Polaroid format) and mimicking the aging effects on pictures that are thus made to look as though they belong to a distant period, users endow daily life experience with the authenticity and emotional quality associated with bygone times. Retro aesthetics thus double up the ‘melancholic’ nature of traditional vernacular photography. But this new technology reveals a paradox: turning the present into past might well be a way of living in the present.

Media and Nostalgia Yearning for the Past, Present and Future Edited by Katharina Niemeyer The French Press Institute/CARISM, Pantheon-Assas University, Paris 2, France katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 3 The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography Gil Bartholeyns Tempora non vacant. Augustine of Hippo Once upon a time in the wonderful world of images, a few brave engineers discovered how to turn light into digital signals. But they were unaware that their invention would eventually lead to the pixellation of our entire visual world and that this new technology would soon create upheaval in the longstanding pairing of image and time. When digital becomes analogue Over the course of a decade, digital cameras became so highly automated and so effective that the images they produced began to be described as cold and disembodied in comparison to traditional pictures. Ana- logue photography was expensive and its results were uncertain, yet they had the advantage of being ‘alive’. There was greater nostalgia for the warmth of these renderings than for the people and things they depicted, and it was this that caused the birth of the lo-fi photogra- phy movement. In the vanguard was Lomographische AG, a company that marketed cheap cameras with unpredictable photo outcomes and, in doing so, brought to light hundreds of thousands of ‘lomographers’ around the world. Digital technology, however, was not about to stop just when things were going so well. Having achieved optical perfec- tion, it could now simulate photographic imperfection. And so, in 2009 and 2010, a series of mobile phone applications began offering to sim- ulate the square-format photos of the old Brownie, the warm colours of the Polaroid and all the delightful imperfections of family photography 51 katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 52 Analogue Nostalgias in the 1960s–1980s, such as vignetting and over-exposure. The pre- tence went as far as reflecting the physical nature of prints, reproducing the ravages of time, such as desaturation and scratching (Figure 3.1).1 Indeed, to take up the slogan of Hipstamatic, one of the key apps on the market, ‘digital photography never looked so analogue’. In 2013, there are several dozen photographic apps (as well as video apps, imitating Super 8 film and the silent movie era) which enable the analogue images of another age to be digitally produced and the pho- tographs themselves to be presented as older than they are. There are hundreds of millions of people more or less actively engaged in what fans and manufacturers alike call iPhonography, following the success of the iPhone and the pioneering apps available on it. There are cur- rently several billion retro images in circulation via social networks apps and image-sharing websites.2 No one among the prophets of media use could have foreseen that Western visual retromania at the start of the twenty-first century would be led by mobile phone photography. No culture maven could have envisaged that the images of advertising, music, photojournalism (Lavoie, 2012), the arts and even cinema would all fall prey to the charms of a vintage aesthetic that is both crude and kind, with mobile apps necessarily acknowledged as blazing the historical trail (Bartholeyns, 2012). Outmoded images fit perfectly into the contempo- rary culture of remakes, patinas and reuse, which has taken the luxury goods and design world just as much by storm as it has average con- sumers (Miller, 2009), the culture industry (Reynolds, 2011), supporters of economic de-growth and lovers of second-hand objects (Gregson and Crewe, 2003). The ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) and those who lamented the passing of analogue and toy cameras (Meredith, 2010) gave an indication of how successful these images might be if extensively taken up by digital technology. The rise of a mimetic technology An explanation given in terms of ‘the spirit of the age’ is never a sat- isfactory one. First, it is wrong to see passion for visual vintage as a generational effect. If it were, the fans of revisiting the past would be people who had lived through the relevant periods. That said, this is part of it: a new chapter to be added to the sequence of generational nostalgias that have often been described. However, when objects or trends come back into favour it is not always down to those who grew up with them and for whom they act as generational identity markers katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 53 Figure 3.1 The apps replicate the look produced by old technical processes. They reveal the materiality of photographs and how images age3 katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 54 Analogue Nostalgias (Davis, 1979; Wilson, 2005). The last analogue generation may drive the market and cultivate the myth, but it is evident that most users are, in fact, digital natives. Heritage anthropology (Berliner, 2012), medieval- ism and dinosaurs are striking examples that prove people can feel nostalgia for situations that they have not lived through. There is a wealth of this exogenous nostalgia in today’s cinema (Beumers, 2005; Cook, 2005). It is entirely possible to fantasise about ‘the halcyon days’ before you were born and to feel the mythologising effect of intention- ally aged images. These images act in the same way for everyone because they exist in the present but bear the hallmarks of authenticity that sug- gest they also existed in the past: ‘the tense of the mythological object is the perfect: it is that which occurs in the present as having occurred in a former time, hence that which is founded upon itself, that which is “authentic” ’ (Baudrillard, 1996, p. 75). In the early 2000s, we were at a socio-technical bottleneck. Traditional digital cameras already offered black-and-white and sepia photos in the 1990s. Creative retouching software had long provided a wide choice of filters and effects. Neither of these two options, however, enabled vin- tage style to become widespread in amateur photography. Four events then occurred at almost the same time. First, cameras were added to the telephones people carried everywhere. This convergence altered the very status of photography. Already a part of family life and the ama- teur sphere, photographs became more opportunistic and even more routine: slices of life and intimate scenes, commemorative in nature and potentially nostalgic, could now be enhanced by historicising fil- ters. Second, photography software for mobile devices was developed. Unlike computerised retouching, which takes time and skill, image pro- cessing now happens as the picture is taken, while processing at a later stage is extremely simple. Third, built-in cameras improved: their move from five million to eight million pixels in 2010 was a deciding fac- tor in the extent to which technology would become mimetic. Finally, apps were linked to specialist and general social networks (Instagram, for example, was embedded in Facebook), leading to an unprecedented insertion of photography into the vernacular system of communication. The triumph of the aesthetics of the imperfect is certainly due to the aspects of the prevailing atmosphere that I have pointed out above (Bartholeyns, 2012, 2013b), but it was innovations, such as the camera phone, mobile apps, high-quality digital technology and then ‘shar- ing’, that really enabled them to take off. Although technology rarely determines culture, it is quite clear that improvements in mobile phone cameras (rather than the desire to computerise old prints) were the katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com Gil Bartholeyns 55 precondition for an illusionist technology that would ultimately pro- duce simulations of analogue photographs, which would be able to evoke the same emotional associations as the originals. Since it is delib- erate and immediate, the metamorphosis of present into past has given rise to a new kind of nostalgia. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be Before now, nostalgia was a feeling experienced only when revisit- ing where we came from, looking through family photo albums or going over escapades from the past with our friends. Time always came between us and the subject of our nostalgia. Waiting was required. Time had to do its work. It was necessary to forget and then to be reminded by a search or conversation or by seeing a photograph again. Nostalgia, like nightfall, took us by surprise. This Proustian emotion would suddenly bring us close to tears, its sweetness flooding through us as we thought back to moments so distant that they seemed to have been experienced by someone else. In short, nostalgia could not be ordered on demand. Now, however, we can conjure it up and, even as we experience it at the sight of something on the street, at home or on a journey, we have the means to display it and be moved by it (Figure 3.2). I am going to call the feeling of nostalgia deliberately brought about by a specific action ‘self-induced nostalgia’. The ways in which we do this – by writing poems, going up into the attic or taking meditative walks – could be regarded as Foucauldian ‘techniques of the self’, or methods we use to bring aesthetic value to our lives. In this respect, photo apping is a brand new way of practising nostalgia. Davis (1979) has suggested that we talk about the ‘aesthetic modalities’ of nostal- gia. There is an art to evoking nostalgia in music, dance or painting, to finding ‘aesthetic equivalents of this form of consciousness’. Depend- ing on the period, each artist decides on the forms and themes most likely to trigger an experience of nostalgia. The use of filters in pho- tography is one of these aesthetic modalities. It differs from the rest, however, in that it is practised by millions of ordinary people rather than by professional artists. The current modality is far more widely shared than that of a painting or a performance. Lastly, the distinction Davis (1979, pp. 122–124) made between ‘private’ nostalgia and ‘collec- tive’ nostalgia is even more problematic than he stated himself. This is because photographs are both personal and widely distributed. It is pos- sible here to talk about ‘biographical nostalgia’. Photos are not where collective nostalgia is located. However, the individual experience to katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 56 Analogue Nostalgias Figure 3.2 Little Tripping Nostalgia by Vlad Lunin, 27 December 20104 which they bear witness is massively shared. An extensive investigation based on global image-storing and sharing sites Flickr.com, Picasa.com and Photobucket.com, which host a mixture of professional and can- did photography, does indeed show that pictures produced by the apps we have referred to are deliberately associated with nostalgia. Certain photos are composed with the aim of conveying that feeling to the photographer or an outside observer. The connection to nostalgia is made by the users themselves when they identify pictures by titles, tags and comments, which they do to a greater extent than for traditional photos. This is confirmed by an analysis of the relatively manageable material on WeHeartIt.com (Figure 3.3), a site that allows its mem- bers to bring together media found elsewhere (on Facebook, Tumblr, or Blogspot blogs). Of the first 2,000 images with the ‘nostalgia’ tag (3 May 2013), 43 percent involved the use of photo apps,5 despite there being a more heterogeneous range of images (moments from television, old pictures, quotations) than on the larger sites already mentioned, which bring together photos taken by their members. On Flickr (a search returned 286,925 ‘nostalgia’ tagged photos on 13 May 2013), for instance, there katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com Gil Bartholeyns 57 Figure 3.3 Screenshot of the list of WeHeartIt.com, 3 May 2013 are entire series with the title Nostalgia,6 and any visitor may add nos- talgia tags or leave comments. The nostalgic component of these images is usually obvious: two girls taking a photograph of themselves in a shared moment, an old tractor overgrown by weeds, someone sitting alone on the beach. Sometimes, the aesthetic component is all it takes for seemingly neutral subjects, such as an empty swing, a dish served in a restaurant, or a country cottage, to be ‘nostalgised’. Their description alone may induce a feeling of nostalgia. All that is needed is a period look or an instruction on how to interpret the image. This is what I refer to as the ‘nostalgiability’ of the world. What normally happens first is as follows: an analogue rendering is imposed on scenes or objects with the immediate effect of making them seem older than they are, as in this 1980s-style view of Charlotte, North Carolina, taken in July 2011,7 or this halo-effect, black-and-white view of a New York street, taken in November 2012 and entitled Leone Tribute.8 Over and above the vari- ous practices, two major trends stand out. Either the subject matter itself prompts the use of vintage filters or the apps encourage shots of older subject matter. Let us look at both of these. Emotion: The accelerating factor Personal subject matter with an emotional charge linked to the passage of time or to days gone by is conducive to the use of backward-looking aesthetics. It includes holidays, visits abroad, homecomings and, a subject that is always changing, children. A sentimental snapshot of katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 58 Analogue Nostalgias a flower on flickr.com, burnished and in close-up, triggers an auto- biographical story and aptly uses and illustrates the Collins English Dictionary’s definition of nostalgia: Nostalgia – a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time. Because when the old people visit, I get very nostalgic for a time when we lived two miles apart. Wordy wednesday #27 Amber Estrella, 186/365 – nostalgia, 6 July 20119 The intensity of certain moments, the reason they are photographed in the first place, calls out to be conveyed in graphic form, something no traditional photo could do. Outward appearance relays the inward perception of the moment. This sensitive layer intensifies both the photographed subject and the lived moment. One person offers the fol- lowing story to go with their picture of the Ala Moana Centre (Honolulu, Hawaii) taken using Instagram: Taken this morning on my way to work. This building was always so distinctive to me as a kid because of the spaceship-looking restaurant that sat at the top. I still remember once my mom and I ordered a soda, and sat in there until it did one full revolution. My current primary care physician has an office in here. I also got drug tested for my first post-college job in this building. I feel nostalgic looking at it. allysonnona, 180/i365: Ala Moana Building, 29 June 201110 This type of association does not appear in classic snapshots. Old pho- tos may also be photographed and then ‘retro-ised’ (Figure 3.4). A digital image can be processed, as the caption to a photo of two children play- ing in a garden explains: ‘Cousins. Original photo taken with a Canon p & s, photo imported into iPhone 3GS and modified with the app Lo-Mob’.11 A boy, his satchel on his back, walks away down a street. The image is orange and highly vignetted. A mother has just taken a photo of her son going to school. It’s his first day at secondary school. She looks at the photo and writes: Our eldest son started secondary school today. It’s one of those moments when you reflect on human mortality, the much too fleet- ing nature of time, pride, love, loss, happiness, sadness, nostalgia . . . a katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 59 Figure 3.4 Covers and analogue simulations of old digital photos. Top and bottom: Gak, halfway up Mt McKay circa the early 1980’s, 18 February 2011, by Gary A. K.; Cousins, 26 April 2010, by Anne H.12 katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 60 Analogue Nostalgias Toy Story 3 moment . . . ;). I would’ve cried proud, happy, sad, nostal- gic tears had the 3 years old not decided to have a screaming tantrum at the moment No1 son left the house! Although, writing this and looking at this photo of him stepping out alone, too long trousers, baggy jumper, dwarfed by his mahoooosive backpack . . . there is a lumpy throat and a damp eye. Sas & Marty Taylor, Breaking free . . . , 10 September 201013 This mum, who has seen her son setting off for school, has just pho- tographically manufactured a memory and a moment. The aesthetic of the photo is complicit in her emotion, as is the choice of ambience. Her impression and her comments would have been different if the pic- ture had not had the appearance of times gone by. There is, therefore, the question of what goes on when real time comes between vintage photos and the person who took them. A quick survey reveals that, after two or three years, these images give the impression that ‘more’ time has elapsed. It is precisely this sense of time passing, this feel- ing of distance, that lies at the heart of our visual nostalgia. Svetlana Boym (2001, pp. 41–55) distinguishes between ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’. Our subject here is certainly not the former, since restorative nostalgia seeks to recreate what has been lost or to return to a former situation. Nor, however, is it entirely the latter, since reflective nostalgia relates to the individual or collective feeling of a bygone age that may now be enjoyed by remembering it and appre- ciating its material culture. The nostalgia here is staged but it has no referent. It is not based on anything that came before. Rather, it is gen- erated in a bid to render the present more poignant. This is achieved through the added emotional value provided by a temporal distance that is made visible by a dated aesthetic and by passing off photographs as older than they are. The mother experiences nostalgia not at seeing her son go off to school but at seeing the photo of her son going off to school. This really is a self-induced nostalgia and even, to some extent, a tautological one. Time regained and the nostalgia market Pin-up posters, old cars, obsolete instruments. Apps encourage pho- tographs of the out-of-date objects and old-fashioned decors that people have at home or encounter in the outside world (Figure 3.5). The WeHeartIt.com sample discussed above reveals that old or old- fashioned things constitute the subject matter of half the vintage images katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 61 Figure 3.5 To photograph ancient artefacts and environments, to disclose their historicity. Top and bottom: Coastal drive, 10 October 2012; The Allure. Vintage photo booth vendor at the San Bernardino County Fair, 5 May 201114 katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 62 Analogue Nostalgias with a ‘nostalgia’ tag: a train, a typewriter, a tea set, a clock, etc. These objects, such as a Volkswagen Van or a little cottage in the woods, con- jure up an alternative, premodern or bohemian lifestyle. There are two prime reasons why people hang on to things. The first is design, which is a major time marker because it often changes so rapidly. The second – judging by the impressive amount of old-style telephones, record play- ers, rolls of film, old photos and even silver-process cameras displayed together in photographs – is technology. The still life with a predilection for mise-en-abyme is making a surprise comeback. When enveloped in a dated aesthetic, objects and settings appear to have been reinstated to their respective periods. These periods are usu- ally a generic ‘past time’, although it does seem that there are attempts to give subjects the ‘colour’ appropriate to their periods (Figure 3.6). The car and even the moped photographed on 5 January 2011 (second pic- ture of Figure 3.6) are emblematic of a given period and have the texture the image would now have acquired had it been taken at that time. More than anything else, the aim is to bring back the atmosphere created by the thing seen. The flash of nostalgia may be caused by the object itself, and, indeed, this is often what triggers the reflex to take a vintage photo, but what the vintage visual achieves is the expansion of a given object’s nostalgic range with the image as its focal point. Apps are marketed on the basis of three selling points, in addition to the existence of the picture-sharing community. These are nostalgia, personalisation and their status as analogue artefacts. This can be seen in the way these apps are described: ‘Instant Nostalgia now free’ (Retro Camera), ‘Find out how your photos would look like if you took them decades ago’ (Old Photo Pro), ‘The Hipstamatic brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty [ . . . ] of cameras of the past’. This latter web publisher is a good example. Its promotional website, wiki.hipstamatic.com, presents cases, films and flashes as if they had physical existence, and their names (Ina’s 35 or 69, etc.) speak volumes. The parent company, Synthetic, hooked up with Nike to offer a ‘hipstapak’ with the slogan ‘Past meets present meets you’ (Figure 3.7). This publisher has also provided a story of the product’s origins. The story is told by Richard, older brother to the two main char- acters, on the history.hipstamatic.com blog. In 1980s Wisconsin, the Dorbowski brothers, inspired by a Russian plastic camera, had put their own version into production when they were killed by a drunk driver. The app was created as a tribute to them. Symbol creators, to use David Hesmondhalgh’s term, leave nothing to chance. The triangle katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 63 Figure 3.6 Restoring the visual aesthetics of their time to things. Top and bottom: Got the deck hooked up, 10 July 2011, by John Common; Nostalgia in Snow, 5 January 2011, by Tanja Taube15 katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 64 Analogue Nostalgias Figure 3.7 The virtual materiality of cameras and films. ‘Past meets present meets you’16 of engagement – reason, appeal, spirituality – is an equilateral one. In actual fact, the marketing strategy merely dramatises our normal rela- tionship with photography in general. Indeed, all these apps reiterate the ‘nature’ of what is photographed. From its inception, photography has been experienced and used as a melancholy medium, preserving what is in the process of disappearing. ‘The photographer’, Susan Sontag wrote (1979, p. 67), ‘is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it.’ Every photo transforms its current subject into a touching antiquity. Sontag’s remarks about classic photography in the chapter ‘Melancholy Objects’ (1979) are still very much pertinent today, and apply even more here: ‘in addition to romanticism (extreme or not) about the past, photography offers instant romanticism about the present’. katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com Gil Bartholeyns 65 Expressivism, pictorialisation, and the past as an aesthetic experience Whether applied to old objects or to scenes of daily life, the goal of imposing a backward-looking aesthetic is to provide a visual sensation of the atmosphere attached to the photographed object or moment. From iPhonographers’ blogs and forums, it is clear that apps enable a certain something about the moment to be expressed, its resonance conveyed: the ‘weeping’ street of heartbreak, the ‘pastel’ landscape of melancholy. The general function of photo apps for phones is to repro- duce the context that has been felt. Pic Grunger, for example, offers a wide range of patinas (e.g. aged, cracked, creased, scuffed), while the official site, Saspring.com/picGrunger, shows ‘war-torn’ photos of con- certs and parties. This expressivism brings photo apping closer to the pictorialism of the end of the nineteenth century, the romanticism and anti-modernism of which have been stressed on many occasions. Pho- tographers set about using all the arts of retouching to simulate that certain something, that aura, which photographs lost with the arrival of high-quality lenses (Benjamin, 1999, p. 517). Representation is imbued with a degree of iconicity. The transparent representation of things becomes an image (Bartholeyns, 2013b). Pho- tography is no longer a medium intended to record the real. The image is no longer secondary to reality. The subject matter can no longer be detached from its image. We no longer pass through the image; we see it; it is present. Contemporary artists have similarly put image before rep- resentation, working on and with time (Bartholeyns, 2012) – damaging their photographs (Deborah Turbeville), rescuing neglected old prints and negatives (Joachim Schmid, Figure 3.8) and using techniques from the past (McDermott and McGough). The emotion no longer comes primarily from immediate access to the ‘that-has-been’, the classic, Barthesian modality for the photographic emotion. It stems, instead, from the visual contamination of the subject photographed. Nostalgia used to depend on the denial of access to the subject, on its unreachable presence. Now, there is an effective formula to encourage nostalgia. The cult of the referent is being replaced by the cult of the reference, reference to an iconography that, in its form, is typical of memory. The indexical nature of photography is giving way to the power of fantasy (Bartholeyns, 2013b). What is it that we are doing, exactly, when we take a picture of a scene as if it were not here and now but, rather, some time ago? The answer could be that we are making the present – or the moment that has katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 66 Analogue Nostalgias Figure 3.8 Between the subject matter and ourselves: the ‘image’. Arcana 1996/2008, Cambridge, March 1992 by Joachim Schmid17 just gone by – omnipresent, thus presenting further proof for Hartog’s theory of ‘presentism’ (Hartog, 2003). This would be wrong, however (Bartholeyns, 2012). First, a liking for artificial patinas is nothing new (see, for example, Charpy, 2012), even though today’s relationship with the past is very different from what it was (Bartholeyns, 2013c). Indeed, from the point of view of experience, it is quite the opposite: it is no longer the past that is injected into the present but the present that is projected back into the past. The contemporary is being destroyed for the sake of a more intimate, less impersonal perception. Similarly, when an outmoded object is photographed with an aesthetic from a katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com Gil Bartholeyns 67 time when it was not out of date, the historicity of things is revealed and anachronism created in the present (Bartholeyns, 2013a, pp. 125–130). Nostalgia is a time-induced melancholy. Logically, it ‘operates’ through the signs of the times. It also teaches the reverse, that the past is an aes- thetic category in its own right, far removed from history (Bartholeyns, 2010). What nostalgia does to the present Although there are problems in seeing nostalgic imagery as a way of immediately enjoying the memory of something that has only just happened, we might nevertheless wonder (without entering into a soci- etal analysis) what anxiety this imagery is a symptom of, or, to put it less clinically, what the effect might be of this kind of photography on temporality. It makes it possible to appropriate present time, to be the contemporary of our own emotions. This fact, which practition- ers discuss among themselves, chimes with thinking about the modern experience of time (Flaherty, 2010). On the basis of research into the sub- jective perception of time, Hartmut Rosa (2010) explains that a time rich in experiences goes very quickly but gives the impression of having been incredibly long, whereas successive and passive activities have the oppo- site qualities. Indeed, it is this latter type of activity that is characteristic of life today: our daily routine consists mainly of isolated activities – working, shopping, looking after children, watching television – which leave few ‘memory traces’ because they are isolated, de-contextualised, not connected to one another in any significant way. This is the oppo- site of times full of ‘lived experiences’ (the Erfahrungen Walter Benjamin contrasted with Erlebnissen, episodes of experience). The backward-looking aesthetic appears to be a way of cordoning off the time we find so hard to inhabit, of playing with how it is ordered and perceived and of mounting a defence against the feeling that time passes quickly, leaving no trace. The outcome, the feeling of nostalgia, connects the present to the past. Above all, it puts the present at the forefront of existential depth. There is a paradox in wanting to isolate the present by making it pass more quickly, but such is the law: every- thing that is transformed into the past and rendered tangible as such will be saved from the void. Notes 1. To gain an understanding of this new photography, the reader is asked to visit the following websites: www.ippawards.com, www.iphoneographie. katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com 68 Analogue Nostalgias com, or individuals’ photostreams, for example www.flickr.com/photos/ 32368901@N02/page2/ or www.flickr.com/photos/bluemoonrabbit/ 2. For convenience, I do not follow the useful distinction Reynolds (2011) makes between ‘vintage’ (real objects from the past) and ‘retro’ (which simulates a past style). 3. Top and bottom: Memories of San Clemente Pier – Hipstamatic & Pic Grunger, 29 March 2010; Dragonfly – AE TTV Desaturated, 21 March 2010; Window Rock, Arizona – News Emulsion, using Lo-Mob, 21 March 2010, by Jeffery Turner (CC = Creatives Commons). 4. Screenshot of flickr.com/photos/vrevolution/5298548170/ (Courtesy of the Author). 5. A small margin of error must be taken into account because some images are ambiguous. With some exceptions, I have not retained these. All Internet links quoted were checked in May 2013. 6. Most of our examples are from Flickr because the URLs are relatively short. 7. flickr.com/photos/danielstaten/5898880409/ 8. flickr.com/photos/vinzo/5149324192/ 9. flickr.com/photos/westars3/5983832356 10. flickr.com/photos/ahinpgh/4554977604/in/photostream/ 11. flickr.com/photos/ahinpgh/4554977604/in/photostream/ 12. flickr.com/photos/gak/5496550888/in/photosof-gak/ and flickr.com/photos/ ahinpgh/4554977604/in/photostream/ (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). 13. flickr.com/photos/dacheeses/4977847410/in/set-72157624879220569 14. Images by Notorious JES (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). 15. With courtesy of the authors, photos taken in 2011. 16. Screenshot of 30 June 2011 editorial at www.nike.com/be/en_gb/ 17. On paper, 35×39 cm, print was made from found negative, http://schmid. wordpress.com/works/1996-arcana/ (Courtesy of the Author). References Bartholeyns, G. (2010) ‘Le passé sans l’histoire. Vers une anthropologie culturelle du temps’. Itinéraires. Littérature, textes, cultures, 3, pp. 47–60. Bartholeyns, G. (2012) ‘L’iPhonographie: la machine à fabriquer le temps’. Culture Visuelle, http://culturevisuelle.org/blog/10514 (accessed 9 July 2013). Bartholeyns, G. (2013a) ‘Voir le passé: histoire et cultures visuelles’, in C. Granger (ed.) A quoi pensent les historiens? Faire de l’histoire au XXI e siècle. Paris: Autrement, pp. 118–134. Bartholeyns, G. (2013b) ‘Le retour de l’image: iPhonographie et esthétique du passé’, in D. Dubuisson and S. Raux (eds) A perte de vue. Les nouveaux paradigmes du visual. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, forthcoming. Bartholeyns, G. (2013c) ‘Loin de l’Histoire’. Le Débat, 177(5), pp. 117–125. Baudrillard, J. (1996 [1968]) The System of Objects. London and New York: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1999 [1931]) Little History of Photography. Selected Writings vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Berliner, D. (2012) ‘Multiple nostalgias: The fabric of heritage in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR)’. JRAI, 18(4), pp. 769–786. Beumers, B. (2005) Nikita Mikhalkov. Between Nostalgia and Nationalism. London- New York: I.B. Tauris. katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com Gil Bartholeyns 69 Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Charpy, M. (2012) ‘Patina and the Bourgeoisie: The Appearance of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, in V. Kelley and G. Adamson (eds) Surface Tensions. Surface, Finish and the Meanings of Objects. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 49–59. Cook, P. (2005) Screening the Past. Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London- New York: Routledge. Davis, F. (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. Flaherty, M. G. (2010) The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gregson, N. and Crewe, L. (2003) Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Hartog, F. (2003) Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil. Lavoie, V. (2012) ‘War and the iPhone: New Fronts for Photojournalism’. Etudes Photographiques, 29, pp. 204–241. Meredith, K. (2010) ‘Toy Cameras, Creative Photos: High-end Results from 40 Plastic Cameras, Rotovision’. http://lomokev.com/books/toy-cameras- fantastic-plastic-cameras/ (accessed 2 July 2013). Miller, D. (2009) ‘Buying Time’, in E. Shove, F. Trentmann and R. Wilk (eds) Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 157–169. Reynolds, S. (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London- New York: Faber & Faber. Rosa, H. (2010) Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Malmo: NSU Press. Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. L. (2005) Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com

References (33)

  1. or individuals' photostreams, for example www.flickr.com/photos/ 32368901@N02/page2/ or www.flickr.com/photos/bluemoonrabbit/
  2. For convenience, I do not follow the useful distinction Reynolds (2011) makes between 'vintage' (real objects from the past) and 'retro' (which simulates a past style).
  3. Top and bottom: Memories of San Clemente Pier -Hipstamatic & Pic Grunger, 29 March 2010; Dragonfly -AE TTV Desaturated, 21 March 2010; Window Rock, Arizona -News Emulsion, using Lo-Mob, 21 March 2010, by Jeffery Turner (CC = Creatives Commons).
  4. A small margin of error must be taken into account because some images are ambiguous. With some exceptions, I have not retained these. All Internet links quoted were checked in May 2013.
  5. Most of our examples are from Flickr because the URLs are relatively short.
  6. Images by Notorious JES (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
  7. With courtesy of the authors, photos taken in 2011.
  8. Screenshot of 30 June 2011 editorial at www.nike.com/be/en_gb/
  9. On paper, 35×39 cm, print was made from found negative, http://schmid. wordpress.com/works/1996-arcana/ (Courtesy of the Author).
  10. Bartholeyns, G. (2010) 'Le passé sans l'histoire. Vers une anthropologie culturelle du temps'. Itinéraires. Littérature, textes, cultures, 3, pp. 47-60.
  11. Bartholeyns, G. (2012) 'L'iPhonographie: la machine à fabriquer le temps'. Culture Visuelle, http://culturevisuelle.org/blog/10514 (accessed 9 July 2013).
  12. Bartholeyns, G. (2013a) 'Voir le passé: histoire et cultures visuelles', in C. Granger (ed.) A quoi pensent les historiens? Faire de l'histoire au XXI e siècle. Paris: Autrement, pp. 118-134.
  13. Bartholeyns, G. (2013b) 'Le retour de l'image: iPhonographie et esthétique du passé', in D. Dubuisson and S. Raux (eds) A perte de vue. Les nouveaux paradigmes du visual. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, forthcoming.
  14. Bartholeyns, G. (2013c) 'Loin de l'Histoire'. Le Débat, 177(5), pp. 117-125.
  15. Baudrillard, J. (1996 [1968]) The System of Objects. London and New York: Verso.
  16. Benjamin, W. (1999 [1931]) Little History of Photography. Selected Writings vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  17. Berliner, D. (2012) 'Multiple nostalgias: The fabric of heritage in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR)'. JRAI, 18(4), pp. 769-786.
  18. Beumers, B. (2005) Nikita Mikhalkov. Between Nostalgia and Nationalism. London- New York: I.B. Tauris. katharinaniemeyer@gmail.com
  19. Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
  20. Charpy, M. (2012) 'Patina and the Bourgeoisie: The Appearance of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Paris', in V. Kelley and G. Adamson (eds) Surface Tensions. Surface, Finish and the Meanings of Objects. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 49-59.
  21. Cook, P. (2005) Screening the Past. Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London- New York: Routledge.
  22. Davis, F. (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press.
  23. Flaherty, M. G. (2010) The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  24. Gregson, N. and Crewe, L. (2003) Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg.
  25. Hartog, F. (2003) Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil.
  26. Lavoie, V. (2012) 'War and the iPhone: New Fronts for Photojournalism'. Etudes Photographiques, 29, pp. 204-241.
  27. Meredith, K. (2010) 'Toy Cameras, Creative Photos: High-end Results from 40 Plastic Cameras, Rotovision'. http://lomokev.com/books/toy-cameras- fantastic-plastic-cameras/ (accessed 2 July 2013).
  28. Miller, D. (2009) 'Buying Time', in E. Shove, F. Trentmann and R. Wilk (eds) Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 157-169.
  29. Reynolds, S. (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. London- New York: Faber & Faber.
  30. Rosa, H. (2010) Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Malmo: NSU Press.
  31. Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.
  32. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  33. Wilson, J. L. (2005) Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.