Students at Long Beach City College are well-supported in their artistic ventures by photography professor, Brian Doan, who understands the difficulties associated with the rising costs of shooting film in 2024.
Doan believes students want to continue keeping analog alive because of what it means to take the time to do things like film, to physically turn a record over, and how electronics take that away.
“A phone is a multi-tool [..] I think people just want to do one thing at a time, not combine other things, to me it’s more romantic, it’s like love,” said Doan.
According to Doan, Long Beach City College is one of the few colleges in California that has a working darkroom that students frequently use.
“You put your focus onto the person and you forget anything else, it’s important for you to dedicate yourself, like film,” said Doan.
With the demand for analog media and film being seen among young adults, companies are following the trend lead, such as the camera company Pentax coming out with 4 new film cameras for the first time since the early 2000s.
Along with film, things like vinyl and more traditional forms of art have caught even more attention in the eyes of LBCC students.
“I want to study traditional forms of art, things that make me feel away from digital media like painting and drawing, and of course theater being the biggest one,” said theater major Olivia Khale.
Maintaining the traditional arts is increasingly important to young adults as the world enters the age of digital art and artificial intelligence sources like Chat GPT and OpenSource AI.
“It’s so easy to make an image of the sea in AI, to go back and do everything by hand with all the chemicals, you’re taking time….. it’s a reconnection,” said photography major and aspiring photojournalist, Alex Toledo.
“It (AI) looks pretty, but it cannot compare to the landscape of like Ansel Adams or a master that trains from portraits, from music, from literature, or from being American, Japanese, Vietnamese, human,” stated Doan.
The desire to learn analog media is about much more than just the fear of AI for some students.
“I’m here, honestly, for the vibes, the look of film and vinyls heals something in me and I really like the aesthetic of it,” said LBCC student Malaysia Springer.