Last spring, Anthony Tabarez celebrated prom like many high school students today: He danced the night away and captured it with photos and video. The snapshots show Mr. Tabarez, 18, and his friends grinning, jumping around and waving their arms from a packed dance floor.
But instead of using his smartphone, Mr. Tabarez documented the prom with an Olympus FE-230, a 7.1 megapixel, silver digital camera from 2007 and previously owned by his mother. During his senior year of high school, cameras like this appeared in classrooms and at social gatherings. At the senior prom, Mr. Tabarez showed off his camera, which took fuchsia-colored photos that looked so out of the early s.
“We’re so used to our phones,” said Mr. Tabarez, a freshman at California State University, Northridge. “If you have something else to shoot at, it’s more exciting.”
Generation Z’s childhood cameras, considered obsolete and pointless by those who originally owned them, are back in fashion. Young people enjoy the novelty of an old look, praising digital cameras on TikTok and sharing the photos they take on Instagram. On TikTok, the hashtag #digitalcamera has been viewed 184 million times.
Modern influencers like Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Charli D’Amelio encourage the fun and emulate their early 2000s counterparts by shooting blurry, overexposed photos. Instead of paparazzi publishing these photos in tabloids or on gossip websites, influencers post them on social media.
Most of today’s teens and youngest adults were babies at the turn of the millennium. Gen Zers grew up with smartphones that increasingly had everything, making standalone cameras, mapping devices, and other gadgets obsolete. They are now looking for a break from their smartphones; last year, according to the Pew Research Center, 36 percent of American teens said they spent too much time on social media.
That peace of mind comes in part from point-and-shoot compact digital cameras, discovered by Generation Zers digging through their parents’ junk drawers and shopping secondhand. Camera lines like the Canon Powershot and Kodak EasyShare are among their finds, popping up at parties and other social events.
Over the past few years, nostalgia for the Y2K era, a time of both tech enthusiasm and existential dread that spanned the late 1990s and early 2000s, has gripped Generation Z. The nostalgia has spread across TikTok, fueling fashion trends such as low-rise pants, velor tracksuits, and dresses over jeans. Tough brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and Juicy Couture have reaped the rewards; in 2021, Abercrombie reported its highest net sales since 2014. Now there’s Y2K nostalgia for the tech that took these outfits by storm when they first hit the mainstream.
This time, the poor image quality isn’t due to the lack of a better tool. It’s on purpose.
Compared to today’s smartphones, older digital cameras have fewer megapixels, which capture less detail, and built-in lenses with wider apertures, which let in less light, both of which contribute to lower quality photos. But in a feed of more or less standard smartphone photos, the quirks of photos taken by digital cameras are now considered treasures rather than grounds for deletion.
“People are realizing that it’s nice to have something that isn’t attached to their phone,” says Mark Hunter, a photographer also known as the Cobrasnake. “You get a different result than you are used to. There is a little delay in gratification.”
Mr Hunter, 37, cut his teeth capturing early s nightlife using his digital camera. In those photos, celebrities — including “You Belong With Me” era Taylor Swift and the recently famous Kim Kardashian — look like ordinary partygoers, caught in the harsh light of Mr. Hunter’s camera.
He’s now shooting a new cohort of influencers and stars, but the shots would be nearly indistinguishable from his older shots if his subjects were holding flip phones instead of iPhones. They rewind the clock to 2007 and “basically relive every episode of ‘The Simple Life,'” he said, referring to a reality TV show from that era starring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
But many new point-and-shoot digital cameras come with today’s bells and whistles, and older models have been discontinued, so people are turning to thrift stores and second-hand ecommerce sites to find cameras with enough vintage looks. On eBay, searches for “digital camera” increased by 10 percent between 2021 and 2022, with searches for specific models rising even more, said Davina Ramnarine, a spokeswoman for the company. For example, searches for “Nikon COOLPIX” increased by 90 percent, she said.
Zounia Rabotson’s earliest memories are of traveling and posing in front of monuments and tourist attractions as her mother pressed a button and a digital camera came to life. Now a model in New York City, she has returned to her mother’s digital camera, a Canon PowerShot SX230 HS made in 2011.
On Instagram, Mrs. Rabotson, 22, grainy, overexposed photos of herself in denim miniskirts and tiny luxury handbags. She says she looks up to models from her childhood and that shooting photos in a similar style makes her “feel like I’m them.”
“I feel like we’re getting a little too technical,” she said. “Going back in time is just a great idea.”
Mrs. Rabotson does not completely disconnect. She posted her camera on social media, captioning her fourth most popular video on TikTok: “Pov” – point of view – “you fell in love with digital cameras again.”
On TikTok, teens and young adults are now showing off cameras nearly their age and explaining how to achieve a “new aesthetic.” The cameras are not always well received. After influencer Amalie Bladt posted a video to TikTok telling viewers to “buy the cheapest digital camera you can find” for “the overexposed look”, some of the 900+ commenters reacted with horror.
“NO NO NO NO PLS NO I CANNOT LIVE THIS ERA AGAIN,” one person commented. “I swear I’m not that old.”
But comments from desperate millennials and those with more modern tastes were overwhelmed by comments where users tagged their friends and asked how they could upload photos from their digital cameras to their smartphones.
Among some Gen Zers, the digital camera has become popular because it appears more authentic online, and not necessarily because it’s a break from the Internet, says Brielle Saggese, a lifestyle strategist at trend forecasting firm WGSN Insight. Photos taken with digital cameras can “give a layer of personality that most iPhone content lacks,” she said.
“We want our devices to blend quietly into our surroundings and not be visible,” Ms Saggese said. “The Y2K aesthetic has turned that on its head,” she added, mirror selfies and photos where digital cameras are visible accessories as “stylistic choices.”
Rudra Sondhi, a freshman at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, started using his grandmother’s digital camera because it seemed like a happy medium between film cameras and smartphones. He estimates that he takes one picture with his digital camera out of five with his smartphone.
“When I look back at my digital photos” – from his actual camera – “I have very specific memories of it,” said Mr Sondhi. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s nothing special.”
Mr. Sondhi, 18, shares photos taken with his digital camera on a separate Instagram account, @rudrascamera. These photos document the range of young adulthood, from going crazy in a dorm room to moshing at a The Weeknd gig. When he pulls out his camera, he said, his friends immediately think the moment is special.
For Sadie Gray Strosser, 22, using digital cameras marked the beginning of a different phase in life. She took a semester off from Williams College during the pandemic and began using her parents’ Canon Powershot. Her photography Instagram account, @mysexyfotos, cataloged nights out and long drives in low-contrast, faded shots.
“I felt so off-grid, and it almost went hand-in-hand, with a camera that wasn’t connected to a phone,” she said.
When her digital camera broke last summer, Ms Strosser said she was “so upset”. She later started using her grandmother’s Sony Cyber-shot, who was “such a different character”. Meanwhile, if her iPhone broke, she said, “I don’t care.”
