Film photography is often described as honest, natural, and human. But that “honesty” has long turned into nostalgia, a ritual we keep repeating to reassure ourselves that craft means control.
Film photography has once again become a symbol of authenticity. The word “honesty” now almost automatically follows any mention of it. Film has preserved something human: slowness, attention, imperfection, everything the digital process supposedly lacks. The limited number of frames, the imperfect automation, and the wait for development—all of this creates a sense of effort and craft. Film promises engagement and patience, setting itself against the speed of the digital world. Yet behind that feeling lies not a return to reality, but a desire to restore a lost sense of competence. We do not approach authenticity; we only recreate its image.
Nature of Nostalgia
Nostalgia for human-made photography is not born of love for technology, but from the feeling of losing one’s own experience. When skill no longer gives an edge, nostalgia appears as a form of defense. The reaction is natural, but it speaks less about photography than about the wish to regain control. Hence the disdain for automatic modes and the conviction that digital tools have killed the craft. Today, photography moves in the opposite direction: automation releases the gaze and shifts the focus toward choices that make an image intentional.
Photographers once feared that automation would erase the profession, but technology never devalues skill; it only changes where attention is required. It does not devalue craft; it simply changes where the effort is applied. This fear makes photographers vulnerable not to technology, but to their own resistance to change.
Nostalgia does not deserve irony. It reflects an attempt to bring attention back to the process. But that attention belongs not to technology, but to the person. Film can awaken it, yet it does not define the value of the result. The process may be engaging, but that does not make the outcome more honest.
We often idealize the past because we never saw it completely. Weak photographs stayed in family albums, while strong ones appeared in magazines and books, creating the illusion of a higher standard. The truth is, people used to photograph worse. Most images were poorly exposed, awkwardly composed, and never seen beyond private archives. Today it is different. Thanks to smartphones, automatic exposure, and new generations of cameras, the baseline of photography has risen from amateur to professional. Never before have there been so many well-made photographs. The problem is not decline but excess. Technology has leveled the field, and that is why everything now depends not on skill but on vision.
From this comes the persistent belief that photography must be difficult. That ease is suspicious, and that manual control is the mark of professionalism. Yet difficulty alone does not create value, and film does not make an image more honest, just as a pencil does not make a drawing more sincere. It simply offers another way to work. For some, it is a craft; for others, a kind of meditation. But the purity of a result depends not on the material, but on the attention behind it.
Myth of Purity
Film carries no moral weight. What we call honesty in it is simply the look of the past. Photography has never depended on the number of settings. Full control gives confidence, but it does not guarantee meaning. It easily becomes a mechanical repetition. Once, technical mastery defined a professional; today that distinction has faded. Automation has freed photographers from the need to prove competence, shifting the focus to awareness and the ability to see. Film, in this context, has become a symbol of resistance, not of discovery, but of the wish to preserve the familiar order. Acknowledging this does not diminish its value; it returns photography to genuine honesty, attention instead of control.
Most film photographs never reach print. We develop them, scan them, edit them in software, and store them on hard drives. In doing so, film loses what once justified its existence: physical presence, unpredictability, and material truth. A photograph declared analog ends its life in digital form and becomes a simulation. Everything once called honest turns into a ritual without substance. The debate between analog and digital has no real subject, because everything is already digital, even film. The digital photographer works in the same field as the “analog romantic,” only more honestly, without self-deception and without the need to prove loyalty to the past.
Moreover, production, development, and printing require plastic, chemicals, water, and energy. Each roll leaves behind waste and a carbon footprint. Digital technology is cleaner, and this is hard to dispute. Yet the myth of analog purity persists because it preserves a sense of moral superiority, as if labor and physical effort make an image ethically more authentic. In truth, we defend not ecology or aesthetics, but the comforting belief that the old is inherently kinder.
Ritual We Love
Shooting film does not make you better. Working in digital does not justify mediocrity. What defines the result is not the medium or the method, but the intention behind it. Real mistakes are conscious ones. Only then do they create atmosphere, turning the image into an environment rather than a random result. This is what professional honesty means, not the method of shooting, but the awareness of what you do and why.
Film brings back slowness, patience, and ritual. That makes the process appealing, especially for those exhausted by digital speed. Yet the paradox is that film truly slows the process, but not the gaze. Without a physical object, that slowness remains only within the photographer; it never reaches the viewer. This is not about truth, but about sensation. For some, it is a way to recover focus, for others to regain a sense of materiality. All this is valuable as long as it does not replace the conversation about meaning itself.
Film no longer offers what people seek in it. Its results are not cleaner, sharper, or deeper. We use it not for quality, but for the feeling of participation. Settings and development have long ceased to be exploration and have turned into a ritual of confirming one’s technical mastery.
The honesty of photography today lies not in old methods but in the ability to work with a changed medium, in clarity of vision, and the readiness to see the present without hiding behind the image of the past.
Perhaps this is where the commercial meaning of film remains: not in the result, but in the story a client tells their friends. It only works where individuality matters more than speed—in fine art photography, where process becomes part of the author’s image. Film can be captivating, but it is no longer honest. True honesty in photography lies in clarity of vision and in the readiness to work with reality itself, not with its comforting reflection in memory.
25 Comments
Totally agree with this. The whole “film equals honesty” thing is mostly nostalgia at this point, it's almost like it's become a comforting myth. I shoot digital, and when I want that film vibe I just use something like Photoworks with its film-style effects for the post-processing as I see no need to romanticize the process. In the end, it’s the vision that matters, not the medium.
Also, love this:
"technology never devalues skill; it only changes where attention is required"
Well put!
I shot film for 70 years, then digital came along. Once digital cameras got enough pixels I switched and never looked back! What an improvement!
A thoughtful article Alvin, thank you. So much of art is wrapped up in the stories we tell ourselves, especially those that connect to our own values. I learned photography when film was all we had and have almost no nostalgic feelings about those days. There is something very human in wanting the esoteric, to belong to a select group. Using film in the digital age is one such bit of arcane lore, but of course real photographers can also make prints on light-sensitive paper!
I also enjoy seeing cars from my childhood lovingly preserved by enthusiasts, but I have no wish to travel any distance in one - because I remember what they were like!
Many of the revered names in photography handed their films over to specialists to make the prints, so you could say that they gave up an essential creative process to another creative artist’s real intelligence. We usually know only the name of the one who pressed the shutter.
In addition to the ideas that you discuss, a story I have heard repeatedly about film is that it is honest in the sense that it is a true representation of the subject and not subject to the processing trickery of digital cameras. When this is from someone using sheet film in a view camera, I wish them well and privately hope that they learn to look a little more carefully. Film has never been very accurate in recording reality, but then it was not meant to be; people have always wanted pleasing images. Those of us who strive to be better photographers have to find the process rewarding and hope that others appreciate and connect with what we create.
Thank you, John. What you describe captures the essential point: photography has never been a neutral transcription of reality, and the belief in film’s “accuracy” is mostly a retrospective illusion. The history of the medium shows this clearly. Many of the iconic prints we now treat as documentary truth were shaped in the darkroom with an intentional hand: Pablo Inirio’s marked-up enlargements for masters like Avedon and Penn are a good reminder of how much interpretation was always present. (A detailed look at those edits makes it harder to maintain the idea that manipulation arrived with digital tools: https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-iconic-prints-… )
Your comment also touches on something important about authorship. For decades, much of the creative responsibility in film workflow belonged to printers whose names rarely appeared next to the final work. In that sense, the division between “real” and “digital” honesty collapses quickly. Both rely on judgement, intervention and the desire to guide how the image will be seen.
What remains constant is exactly what you point out: the process has to feel meaningful for the person doing the work, and the viewer connects not with the material but with the clarity of that intention.
The examples contained in that article you referenced show no more than simple editing of contrast. There is no argument that dodging and burning have been staples of darkroom work since the beginning of photography. I would add that shallow depth of field is another technique that alters our perception of how we normally see with our eyes. That too has been around forever but does not materially alter reality or even public perception of reality. Film's accuracy is only an illusion if you're splitting hairs over whether a shadow is rendered entirely black or shown with some detail. Otherwise, film negatives (unlike digital) generally do not fabricate things which do not exist.
Despite the ability for skilled photographers in the past to perform editing tricks, I stand by my claim that digital technology in the last 30 years has significantly changed the way photography is perceived by society, and is no longer considered an honest medium. Fifty years ago, virtually everyone believed what they saw in a photo was real. Nowadays everyone is skeptical of a photography's authenticity.
My point is not whether it was possible to do some of these editing tricks with film, but that they are so ubiquitous in the era of digital, particularly adding and removing elements from the actual scene thanks to Photoshop. Because of that, photography's credibility for realism has suffered terribly since the advent of digital technology. Not that I wish to go back... I'm merely pointing out the difference in perceptions of honesty between the era of film and today's digital photos.
Maybe instead of saying that film is more honest, let's say that the era of photography in history before digital photography was generally far more honest than it is now.
On a lighter note — and this is a small personal digression rather than a change of subject.
As someone who grew up in a communist country, I can’t fully agree with the idea that the pre-digital era was somehow more “honest.” The world I knew was built on controlled narratives and carefully managed information. Photography wasn’t more trustworthy; people simply had fewer ways to question what they saw. In that sense, today’s environment is far more transparent, not less. The difference is not honesty, but visibility.
Lies and deception have been part of the American fabric too, although obviously not as oppressive as in Communist countries. The United States government did a great deal to conceal the reality of war in Vietnam. Photographs and responsible journalism exposed those lies. Nobody questioned the authenticity of Napalm Girl when the photo appeared. We looked in horror. If it were published today, one side politically (whatever side that would be) would accuse the other of staging or doctoring a photo to support their agenda. Many people would write it off as fake news; others simply would not care after becoming desensitized to the barrage of daily images depicting cruelty of the world we live in today.
Digital technology has created a society of skeptics and done more to create false narratives than film was ever able to do, because it's so easy to manipulate an image to fit what you prefer to believe. We convince ourselves that the sky in our photo really was that colorful, when maybe in reality it was slightly less so. Forgiveable, yes, and inconsequential too, but I raise the point to show how commonplace and ubiquitous digital editing has become, which was the occupation of a privileged few during the era of film. The dividing line between fact and fiction in photography has become blurred beyond recognition with digital images. Then when we place photography into the realm of art, digital editing tools are endless, and truth in what was supposedly an honest medium is further eroded from the perspective of the viewer.
Mr. Kunzelman: Lies and deception has been part of the American fabric. In my opinion, this does and should not mean it is the end all to be all. In my opinion, the American fabric is being shredded bit by bit. My very first camera was a Kodak Brownie Fiesta. I shot b&w roll film for many years with it. I then used a Polaroid instant, Kodak 110 and eventually graduated to 35 mm while serving onboard a guided missile cruiser off the coast of Vietnam. I attended the Art Institute of Boston. There, I learned about exposure shutter speed, composition and the rule of thirds. I used medium format cameras and how to develop color/b&w film. I learned how to burn and dodge images in the darkroom.
It was fun. I still love b&w today. I still use my Canon A1 film camera. I have several Nikon cameras including a Z6 II. I believe technology has moved the art of photography in the next generation. I also believe that technology should not replace the art of photography. Most don't even know what photography means, let alone where it originated from and where. Anyone with a cellular telephone and a good computer program can turn the most simplest image into a so called work of art. I'm not against a slight image enhancement. You take an image and create it lighter, darker or sharper, no problem. The minute you completely overlay additional scenes, AI has taken control and all originality is lost. The viewers should be informed weather any and all images are or were created by AI.
This is just one photographer's opinion.
It's not so much an issue of whether film is more honest than digital, because the two usually overlap in today's electronic world, but that photography undeniably is less honest now than it was before Photoshop and digital manipulation made it so easy to alter images. When I looked at pictures in National Geographic as a kid in the 1960s, I trusted them to be an accurate representation of those faraway places. Now if a picture looks too wild or unusual to be true, it probably is someone's digital imagination.
Photography is no longer purely a credible form of visual communication, as it is a mixture of reality, fiction and art. Literature has always been classified as fiction or non-fiction. The viewer of photography, however, is left to determine which is which. Shooting film nowadays doesn't really change perceptions because the public isn't typically viewing the negative. It may be more honest to the photographer, and I commend their effort to preserve honesty in photography, but pragmatically the rest of the world sees their images in a digital environment.
I understand the concern, but the biggest misconception is the idea that photographic “fakes” began with Photoshop. Digital tools didn’t create manipulation; they only made it easier to notice. Staged, altered and selectively assembled images appeared almost immediately after photography was invented. What digital workflows changed wasn’t honesty but efficiency: once the production of fakes became simpler, their detectability increased as well.
Cottingley Fairies photos are more than 100 years old.
Silly claims about the "honesty" of film just show ignorance of the entire photographic process. Photoshop and AI have made it easier to manipulate images. Fakery has been around as long as people have been making photos. I have no patience for hipsters and their hypocrisy. Authenticity comes from within.
Time for the classic "I shot film for 500 years and now digital and i cant understand why people would choose film today"
hmmm...500 years...a long time...have any photos still?
Honesty lies solely within the integrity of the “photographer” no matter what medium, film or digital.
I completely agree. Honesty depends on the integrity of the photographer, regardless of the medium. But the article isn’t about that.
True... which is why there seem to be so many more fabricated images purposely meant to lie and deceive. The world just doesn't value integrity and civility the way it used to, and the tools which enable people to play tricks are easier to access and use than ever before.
Manipulating pictures to deceive is just the tip of the iceberg. Back in the 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde risked their necks to rob banks. It was a dangerous occupation engaged in by very few. Nowadays I get scam emails and phone calls nearly every day looking to steal my money. Thanks to digital tools, we've created untold numbers of new criminals. Distorting reality with a photograph doesn't seem like such a big deal in comparison. But it all seems to fit in a world where integrity and moral values are being severely tested.
"difficulty alone does not create value"
This should be printed in big red letters on top of every "modern art" museum.
The biggest problem I have with this whole 'film equals honesty' is this lazy stereotype a lot of film photographers have that digital photographers are just snapping away without any real thought to what they are doing, using automation and burst mode and editing in software to the point the photos no longer look anything like the original. Lost count the number of times this gets repeated, especially on all these dumb film vs digital discussions.
FYI, I shoot on digital in full manual with a manual lens and do limited editing to create my look with no manipulation in order to deceive others. I mention this just to illustrate digital doesn't have to be this lazy stereotype a lot of people try to make it out to be.
I agree. Film offers no inherent advantage, just as manual settings don’t. How you shoot is an authorial choice, but what matters is what you show. The result comes first. The amount of labor involved is always secondary and shouldn’t be treated as the main value.
I have never heard anyone say that film is more "honest" than digital. I can tell you that in most instances when I have displayed wet darkroom prints next to ink jet prints, the viewing public tends to gravitate to the silver halide print and not to the ink jet print. Which is better is simply a matter of personal taste, and you will never see the difference in an internet comparison. Film prints, silver halide if you will have a whole different "presence" than inkjet prints. I think it has to do with the fact that with a silver halide print the image image is inside the emulsion and so there is light scatter within the image giving it a softer, more glowing appearance. With an inkjet print the image is on the surface of the emulsion so it takes on a harsher appearance. Probably Epson or Canon or someone will figure out a way to change this. But for now, an ink jet image and a silver halide image side by side will have subtle, though noticeable differences.
So I think that saying one is more honest than the other is a false equivalence. Any image, film based or digitally based is only as honest as the author. I am not in the least bit literally honest with any photograph I ever have made, and have never presented them as an objectively honest presentation. They are almost always a representational interpretation of what I saw. The only exceptions were the times I was doing forensic work, medical work or documentation work for contractors as proof of progress for contractual work. My landscape work, my portrait work, and a lot of my advertising or agency work was very interpretive to get a more pleasing result.
Thank you for a thoughtful and well-considered comment. I’m glad we largely agree that “honesty” isn’t a property of the medium, but of how and why an image is made.
Your point about the material and perceptual differences between silver halide and inkjet prints is well taken. In the article, my focus is simply elsewhere. I’m not questioning those differences, but the way they’re often turned into a moral argument. What interests me is how a physical or perceptual distinction gets reinterpreted as ethical superiority.
So I see your comment as addressing the craft side of the issue, while the text looks at how that craft is framed and talked about. To me, those views complement each other rather than conflict.
It's the same argument I have heard for MANY years, just about different materials. I have been doing photography through almost every major paradigm shift. Your statement is greatly vaild. Case in point. Look at the articles on this website; toys vs ideas and concepts. Therein lies the problem, IMHO. A post about a new whizbang camera with 10K mb sensor will get hundreds, even thousands of likes, comments and endless arguments. The articles about composition, improving one's vision etc. will get 1,000, maybe two if they're very lucky.
Same old thing we've had forever. Canon vs Nikon, Kodak vs Fuji ad nauseum. Your article helped kick a sacred cow. It isn't in the equipment/toys, it's how we present the image. When photography changed from black and white materials only to natural color, from black and white only to dye transfers. From film only to digital the argument has stayed the same. Just using different terms.
One thing that is true if you have the negative is that the negative was in the room or at the place or on the adventure with the photographer. It was exposed to the energy in that place. It was a witness to history.
While am a big fan of film, and an active proponent of the whole analog process, the digital sensor and card were in the room when the image was made as well.