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The True Lives of Millennials, Captured on Film
By Brada - 8 min read
Young photographers are expressing themselves with the photo technology of decades past. Let’s take a look.
“I just wanna do my thing”
― Amy Winehouse
Millennials have a bad reputation. Older generations often consider them self-involved and passive, more likely to consume than to create.
It’s easy to see where the idea originates: The first generation to grow up in a digitized world has unique ways of communication, takes selfies, enthusiastically shares branded messages. But these facts also make it one of the most misunderstood age cohorts in recent history: Just because it behaves differently, it’s no less creative.
In fact, millennials are turning out to be a creative force in photography. Not only have they refined taking digital photography, they’ve also defined the genre of mobile photography. And surprisingly, they’ve embraced a legacy technology at the same time: Film.
“Film is a medium less for recording situations and more for artistically seeing the world”, an EyeEm community member recently explained to us. Taking analog pictures stands in harsh contrast to the fast pace characterizing the digital world – and produces pictures that appear more lifelike than their slick digital equivalents.
Here on EyeEm, we’ve seen a steady stream of film photos being uploaded to our platform – a reflection of this new wave in photography as well as a growing appetite for the look among image buyers.
But first and foremost, these photos show that there’s more to millennials than what meets the eye. Just like the generations before them, they are looking for ways to express themselves – and by choosing film to do it, they’re balancing out the pace of technological progress that dominates our age.
Header image by @Nikos.