There were a few seconds of ontological doubt in the two thousand: is it better to allocate an object to each function or integrate them all into the same super-object? Those of us who wrote gadget reviews at that time futilely insisted on highlighting the virtues of, for example, pocket digital cameras: it's the size of a credit card! It reaches 6 megapixels! The device that would obsess us for the following decades won and is a computer, camera, watch, book, television, GPS, calendar, music player, radio and telephone; unique source of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.
Generation Z has rediscovered that the object performs the function, and that although it is the same, it is not at all the same to take photos with a mobile phone as it is to carry a camera in your bag. They adore the first digicams, those popular Canon, Kodak, Olympus or Sony with dark lenses, flashes, mediocre definition and naive filters. While other generations mythologize the Hasselblad or the Leica despite having seen the birth of both smartphones and fabulous digital SLRs, retro, for the youngest, is not the film –too expensive– but the first pixels. In a world where images are a plague, authenticity means turning them into something special: that vintage photo, later transferred to the mobile and uploaded to TikTok or Instagram, is worth more than its simulation obtained with filters immediately. The worse the better.
This fashion is part of an existing trend that seeks to recover the clothes and the image in general (aesthetic) of the 90s and the first two thousand. The hashtag
It is strange to think that the digital trash of some can be the treasure of others. "Time ends up raising almost all photographs, even the most inexperienced, to the height of art," Sontag wrote. What we did not suspect was that it would happen to us too, and so soon.
