by Adedapo Adeniyi
People raised in Nigerian families and households in the early 2000s grew up around albums and stacks of photographs of parents, uncles and aunties, cousins, grandparents, and siblings. The new gen is bringing back this practice with the resurgence of digicams.
My grandfather had numerous collections of these, he kept video tapes of every of his children’s weddings, every ceremony had photographers around to immortalize the moments, of course as the years passed, my uncles and aunties grew older, moved out of the house one by one, the photographs gradually became more sophisticated, clearer, higher definition, less intimate. I didn’t like that.
Now we’re in the era of the iPhone, and people don’t exactly hire photographers anymore when there are phones that can take pictures just as clearly. For example, selfies have taken over the external perspective, and Snapchat has taken over hardcopy photographs.
Of course, that’s true for the general public, but more recently, we’ve seen the digital camera return into contemporary society, especially among young people in the country, I found that when I was at parties, raves, outings or hangouts between friends, there’d be one or two people (asides myself) holding digicams, lights flashing, these small portable devices making their way around these spaces capturing moments and the people in them.
I saw a post on Instagram in 2023 that said, “Inadvertently, we have manufactured new nostalgia.” I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
If I was to start with my relation to the digital camera, of course the first paragraph of this essay explains so much already, but it transcends that, I’m a nostalgia whore, but outside of just being a person who obsesses over the past, in this sense, I somehow project myself to the future and then obsess about the past, that’s the sentimentality I hold with me when I’m taking photographs.
I treat photography not in present or past tense, but more like an archivist, not concerned with the now but more with how the future will perceive the now, how they’ll refer to it, manufacturing new nostalgia.
Of course, digicams are the most accessible, but even film, vhs and polaroid cameras have reentered the ethos, we are a generation born of old Nollywood and Y2K. This is the most digital we’ve ever been, but we look into old photographs of our parents and people who are old to us now and see the life they had lived, that they were fun too back then, they were once young like us and in love with love and the things of life.
We see their smiles, we see them frozen in conversation with a sibling, we see the pimple on the face of a person who is now obsessed with perfection, we see backdrops unpainted walls with names of friends etched in charcoal, we see people living in the moment with little or no conception of the real time anxiety of posting that social media brought. We had to return to their aesthetics.
I’ve asked two of my friends, Timi Etifa, a visual artist, DJ, and avid digicam photographer, and Lily, a filmmaker, camera collector, and CEO of noirstalgiaave, a retro camera shop(which sold over 800 cameras in 2024), for their thoughts on their experience with the digicam.
“Clear, crisp, cutting-edge cameras of the modern age don’t possess the glittery gleam and joyful manipulation of colours that vintage digital cameras do. Today we have high-resolution cameras even in the iPhones in our pockets, but a photograph must not be crystal clear and precise to be admirable in my eyes.
My love for vintage digital cameras is heavily influenced by nostalgia, especially the mid-2000s period. I like the look of a messy, carefree, indie-sleaze vibe; it looks more real to me. The lower resolution and softness of my camera express the exact emotion and aura in the moment captured.
For example, if I take pictures of my friends at a party, the haze and blur of the pictures perfectly captures the hectic but fun nature of parties. I believe pictures immortalise you from a specific moment, a moment that you might never be again, so I aim to capture them as authentic as possible.”
-Timi.
“When I was younger, we had an old Panasonic camera at home. I think it was digital, but I didn’t know the difference between digital and film. I also used to find developed film rolls around the house, and looking through them was fascinating, though I didn’t think much of it at the time.
Years later, around 2019, I followed a camera page on Instagram. The owner posted pictures taken with a film camera, but I assumed it was just a filter. I became obsessed with adding grain and experimenting with black-and-white edits to achieve that look. That was my first real connection to film cameras and their aesthetic, even though I didn’t fully understand it yet.
In 2021 or 2022, I got my first retro digital camera, a 2003 Fujifilm finepix that used AA batteries. I loved it, but it was cheap and stopped working within a year. By then, I was obsessed with cameras and aspiring to be a filmmaker.
It wasn’t until 2023 that I fully grasped what a film camera was. That led me to research and eventually get an Olympus Superzoom. I wanted to develop and scan film myself but didn’t know where to start. I spent days searching for a lab in Nigeria, assuming I’d have to send my film to the UK for processing. That changed when I started nativecvlt and built a small community. I found a local lab, and we began referring customers to each other, he sends people to me for digital cameras, and I send people to him for film and development. It’s a niche market, and we’ve even collaborated before.
I’ve made mistakes along the way. The first time I helped someone buy a film roll, I accidentally got 120mm instead of 35mm. That mistake cost me 32k or thereabout, and I still have the roll. That was an eye opener,because I clearly missed that in my research.
The journey hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned so much.
In 2023, I also got my first Fujifilm mirrorless camera, and now I have around 30 cameras in my collection. I’ve also helped many people choose the right cameras for their needs.”
-Lily.
The camera is new reality, we are all cosmic engineers recreating perception and images are sentient because we made it so, the digicam and its religion of texture and photographs that pulsate with breath and blood have given us a joy we recognize as intimate, familiar, because we were all once children who viewed the world with wonder and lived through those who had come before us.
And now, we’re laying the bricks so the next generation can live through us and what started off as simulacra has become truth, one click, lights flash, there, now you’ll live forever.
