Silicon Valley would have you believe that people hunger for relentless technological advancement — to communicate exclusively with ChatGPT while wearing mixed-reality headsets and listening to playlists curated by algorithms while traipsing through the metaverse.
In reality, plenty of people resist the encroachment of these inventions on every front of life, drawn instead to the tech others have left behind. Savvy minimalists are swapping out smart devices for “dumb” ones; audiophiles have replaced their AirPods with record players. Tech you thought you’d never see again has a way of popping back up. What’s old to some is new to the young, whose latest discovery-slash-resurrection is the humble disposable camera.
Maybe you’ve spotted disposables at parties or vacations or wedding receptions. Depending on your social circle, you may have that friend (or be that friend) who brings one to every special occasion. Disposable camera sales have been on the rise since 2019 and continue to steadily climb, according to Fujifilm, which says it has seen a “sudden organic resurgence” in popularity, particularly among Gen Z consumers — many of whom were born after the disposable camera’s first cultural peak. “It’s really their first time using cameras in this way,” said Ashley Reeder Morgan, Fujifilm North America Corporation imaging division’s vice president of marketing for consumer products.
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“Anytime I have a bigger social event, I will make an effort to get a disposable camera to capture it,” said Anna McGuire, a 24-year-old graduate student from D.C. She just finished her studies at the London School of Economics and loves using disposable cameras to capture her experiences abroad, including karaoke bars and living-room concerts. “Whenever I have a social event that feels a little special, I’ll get a disposable camera.”
McGuire’s tastes track with the trends, said Neil Saunders, a retail analyst. The disposable has not displaced the phone camera but offers something different — and elusive. “I think people like the technology that they’ve got and they wouldn’t necessarily give it up,” Saunders said. “But they’re looking for something alongside that that’s a bit deeper, that represents a slower pace of life.”
The (rude, frankly) perception of zoomers as phone-addicted lost causes ignores the reality, which is that a lot of people, especially people too young to remember a time before smartphones, “feel tied to their phone in a kind of oppressive way,” said Keara Sullivan, a 24-year-old comedian living in Brooklyn. “I know people feel guilty about: ‘I’m always on my phone. I need to cut back on my screen time.’” Sullivan says disposable cameras have “a cult following,” and she can see why. “The reason I think disposable cameras got so popular in the first place is … your phone has a camera, but it’s not a camera.”
For some, the appearance of a disposable camera is itself a kind of event, a novelty that intrigues and enchants a crowd. “I think there’s something fun about it being this stand-alone, physical object,” McGuire said. “Literally at New Year’s Eve this past year, it almost became a talking point. People I haven’t seen since high school graduation will see the camera and be like, ‘Wait, we want a photo, too!’ There is this excitement of, ‘What is this going to look like when it gets developed later?’”
One-time-use cameras first came to market in the mid-1980s and dominated the space for some 15 years. If you remember, then you know: They were light, relatively cheap and low-stakes. Something about them said: Relax, this is a party. They awaited guests on the tables at Sweet 16 parties and bar mitzvahs; they got tossed in purses for proms, in backpacks for class trips, in suitcases for family vacations; they were sneaked into slumber parties and busted out at bars.
When you’d finished the roll of film (24 or 27 pictures, usually), you’d drop the camera off at a photo shop or drugstore to get them developed. This could take a week or two, but at the time — when plenty of shopping was conducted via phone call after flipping through the catalogue and the internet was still rousing to life at a dial-up pace — this did not seem like some obscene interregnum between having an experience and obtaining its evidence.
The results were a mixed bag, especially when the photographers were adolescent or intoxicated, or if you had imperfect lighting or forgot, yet again, to use the flash. Fleshy fingers crowded picture corners, accidentally beheading some subjects. Even the best images would not be considered high-quality by today’s standards: There was something sort of soft-focus about the images they captured, a good-but-not-great document.
The early 2000s brought the mass adoption of digital cameras, with SD cards that could take large quantities of images and viewing screens at the back so you could see, immediately, whether your eyes were closed and you needed a redo. The pictures were crisper and brighter, with a higher resolution. Just as disposable camera sales were peaking, in 2004, Facebook launched, and before long, everybody decided that half the point of taking photos was posting them — not in a week or two, but right away.
Within a decade, though, the sped-up nostalgia cycle — which had already brought the glossy but expensive Polaroid back from near death — would come to revive the one-time-use camera. Urban Outfitters started selling disposables in 2018. In 2020, Timothée Chalamet brought a disposable camera to the Oscars. In a sort of meta, nesting-doll situation, he was photographed on the red carpet taking photographs with his Fujifilm QuickSnap. Phone pictures were technically better than they’d ever been, and easier than ever to manipulate, but analog images — both 4-by-6 photos from disposable and traditional cameras as well as Polaroids (think of Taylor Swift’s 1989 era, circa 2014) — were becoming popular social media fixtures.
By this point, smartphones were ubiquitous, and the glee that the digital cameras once promised — you can take as many photos as you want! — no longer felt remarkable, or even necessarily desirable. The average camera roll on a phone today is as cluttered as a junk drawer, stuffed with screenshots from old group chats and train tickets and receipts and umpteen variations on the same selfie.
The phone camera has become, for certain tastes, a little too good — unforgiving, unflattering — and the pictures that get posted, probably edited and run through a filter, have an undeniable artifice about them. Everyone knows that’s not what anyone looks like in real life. Disposable camera pictures carry an air of legitimacy. They feel more authentic than images taken digitally.
“A lot of people are used to very powerful cameras on their phones now that are extremely crisp and clear. They capture everything,” Saunders said. Disposables “capture things in sepia tones, almost. People like the warmth of the pictures. There’s a genuineness about the pictures, a graininess. It feels more authentic and a bit softer. … There’s something a bit raw about them, and I think that’s very appealing to a generation that grew up with everything being bright and shiny and perfect.”
The other problem with your phone is that, well, it’s your phone: a portal to every text, call, email, breaking-news alert, store, game and social media platform. As long as your phone is on your person, even when you’re in one place, you are never fully there. Taking out your phone at a party is a way to ensure you are no longer at the party; the party is happening around you, and you are on your phone. “Truly, a phone takes you out of the moment,” Sullivan said. “Whereas if you have a camera, you’re like: ‘Oh, I want to capture that moment.’”
Not to forget what’s arguably the most important factor in the disposable camera’s resurgence: “Everyone does look better on film.”
There’s a great Brian Eno line, from his book “A Year With Swollen Appendices,” about our inevitable infatuation with out-of-date technology: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.” The book was published in 1996, in the very same decade for which today’s zoomers are most nostalgic: a pre-smartphone, barely online era, the dawn of the disposable camera’s first heyday.
In rediscovering this bygone technology, Gen Z fulfilled Eno’s prediction: Everything about the disposable camera that makes it technically “worse” is, in fact, an asset, including the delayed gratification of the development process and the hazy quality of its images, which look like a memory feels: grainy and dreamlike. The fact that you cannot check a photo right after taking it to make sure you like how it looks, surely once seen as a flaw that modern cameras eradicated, is part of the disposable’s charm. Even the orientation of the pictures — typically taken horizontally, rather than vertically — distinguishes disposable camera pictures from their phone-taken counterparts.
McGuire is enamored with “the almost vintage-looking quality” of the photos she gets from disposables. “There’s something generally about analog film photography … [that] does look a little, to me, more like a candid moment from life, and a little less staged or posed in the way an iPhone photo can.”
Kaitlyn Harris, a 26-year-old film photographer from Scottsdale, Ariz., understands the allure of the disposable camera. “The look is so nostalgic, that’s obviously the first word that comes to mind. The classic flash look is really in having that flash on. … It’s like a flash of a memory.”
Still, she has posted some TikToks, under the handle @goodolfilmphotos, imploring her followers to explore other options that are more sustainable and less unreliable. Her top pinned video reads, “Please stop using this camera (I’m begging),” as she holds up the Fujifilm QuickSnap. “I know that sounds a little aggressive,” she says in the clip. “But there’s a very good reason why you can move on and find a better camera than this one right here.”
From Harris’s perspective, potential for disappointment with disposables abounds. “I’ve seen a lot of hurt from disposable with the photos not turning out the way they wanted, because of user error or just the quality of the cameras,” she said. “And sometimes they get lost along the way. I’ve seen a lot of TikToks of brides saying they got five out of the 20 cameras back. Or they don’t get them developed because they didn’t realize how expensive it would be. Or they didn’t use the flash.” Drugstore chains can charge anywhere from $12 to $25 for a set of prints and a CD of digital pictures, but you won’t get your negatives back. Higher-quality outfits like the Darkroom charge some $36 plus shipping for color prints, a USB of your images and negatives.
To avoid these likely disasters and unnecessary waste, Harris suggests using one of the apps, such as Dispo, Tezza and Dazz Cam, that can make a phone image look like one taken on film. (A counterpoint, from McGuire: “People think it’s cheugy in its own right” to use those apps. “You know that they’re not real.”)
Harris has also encouraged her followers to try out “reusable cameras” (as in, a camera, the regular point-and-shoot kind that has film inside), in case they were unaware of this option. Commenters let her know that “they do know reusable cameras exist,” she said. “But they want the look of the disposable.”
Gen Z photographers also seem to want the connection of the disposable — that is, the link it provides to the older generations that used these cameras when they were new.
“Something that always makes me laugh when I think about it is, growing up, you see pictures of your parents when they were in college or in their 20s, and it’s always these dated photos, because they didn’t have phones back then,” McGuire said. “In a weird way, I’m trying to capture some of those moments for myself. These high-definition [phone] pictures of my friends are great, but there’s something that feels more special about the disposable.”
“All my favorite photos of me as a child are on disposable cameras,” Sullivan said, as are all the photos in the albums from “when my parents were in their 20s and 30s.”
She likes how it feels to flip through the photo albums and think of the pictures she’s taking as part of an ongoing tradition. Ironically, it is the photos on phones that feel disposable, and the photos taken by disposable cameras that feel permanent.
“Isn’t this amazing, [that] I have this photo and it looks the same as my parents’ photos of when they were young?” she said. “And maybe one day my kids will look back on this. It makes you think about: Who is going to be looking at these photos in the future?”
“Whereas, with an iPhone photo,” she said, “I never think about that.”