Exploring cameras as artefacts of memory and self
Since its invention, the camera has been a powerful tool. Not only for preserving memories, but also for communicating perspectives, raising awareness, and recording history. In our highly digitised generation, cameras are everywhere. Smartphones now make it possible to capture nearly every moment of our lives. Yet, there is something distinct for me between the quick tap of a phone screen and the tactile experience of using a ‘traditional’ camera: an object of substance requiring manual skills.
I often ask myself why I feel this difference. These devices achieve the same basic goal: capturing a photo. But, there is a subtle distinction between an analog camera and its photograph—a frozen moment of time that resonates more deeply within me. As an archaeologist, I study the evolution of technology throughout time and space to understand human behaviours, allowing my tendency to hyperanalyse the past to influence my attachment to material culture.
As a result, I view my cameras as artefacts. Each camera I’ve used captures a unique moment of my world, as though they are artefacts with their own temporal and emotional weight.
My very first camera was a digital point-and-shoot. Its brick-like build felt enormous in my small hands. Its size and weight forced me to handle it with as much care as my nimble toddler fingers could muster. I remember taking pictures where the camera was tilted, and just maybe, there would be a subject in front of the lens. Yet, more importantly, the digital camera captured the feeling of how a younger me experienced life: an artefact that encapsulated the past perspective of the world I once lived in—unfocused, spontaneous, and full of curiosity.
As I got older, my interest in capturing moments grew. I went to a photography camp, where I first learned how to use a film camera. What I found so special about film photography was the anticipation of not knowing how the photo would turn out. I fell in love with the whole process. The idea of bringing a roll of negatives to life felt as though I was excavating the past: a past uniquely defined by my own memories. The winding of film and the clicking of the shutter, shaped by curated chemical processes, ultimately became a formative way of capturing my life, of personalising images into a feeling.
In high school, I wanted to develop my skills and started using my parents’ DSLR camera. Holding that heavier, more technical camera—and lugging around its big case—felt ‘professional’ in a way, almost like I had unlocked a new level in photography. I experimented with settings, confused by the number of buttons, interested in the struggles of trying something new. As I grew older and developed, so did the technology of my cameras—my so-called artefacts.
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These days, I still use the same waterproof Nikon Coolpix Digital Camera that I brought to sleepaway camp to document the fleeting moments of my young adulthood. The current film camera I use is a Pentax Point-and-Shoot passed down from my parents from the 90s. Ironically, in this digitised generation, trends have brought back the usage of more ‘traditional’ cameras—a hands-on experience that requires intention. In 2018, there was a resurgence in Polaroid cameras, and everyone started carrying around the modern Fujifilm Instax camera. Around 2020, film cameras reappeared, and my friends and I would bring our disposable 27-exposure cameras wherever we went. As if the development of images became a story through altering the frame of a memory.
In the past few years, digital cameras have officially made a comeback, causing everyone, including myself, to start rummaging around our parents’ houses for our childhood cameras. Now, we use our ‘digis’ to capture moments on a night out.
Perhaps this resurgence speaks to cameras’ material importance as objects—and, potentially, as artefacts. The return to ‘older’ cameras suggests that, much like artefacts, they hold enduring value, a tangible bridge between the past and present that reminds us of the original event. The in situ, but frozen, if you will: a deliberate, intentional act of capturing a moment.
One of the reasons why artefacts hold so much significance is due to their status function. Enacting said status function allows us to impose meanings on objects that go beyond their physical form. In my case, I have categorised a camera as a “tool for preserving memory.” This significance, to me, works in a similar fashion to how artefacts embody human intentions and meanings. Despite a camera being a physical object, it continues to shape my experience in perceiving the world through a multitude of lenses as I take photos.
The word ‘artefact’ should define the status of an object rather than its property; temporality is a critical component of what distinguishes artefacts from other objects. As I continue to use cameras, shifting my intentions and assigning new meanings, they, much like artefacts, evolve over time through my interactions with them. The impact of artefacts on us as humans emphasises material agency. Despite their inanimate nature, these objects have the power to shape our actions, perspectives, and even our sense of self.
While the camera is objectively a tool, a “personal artefact” is how I define it. I choose which camera to use, which artefact to dig up, in order to freeze a specific feeling before it passes me by. Cameras become an extension of my body and mind, especially in the way they each reflect different aspects of myself. Beyond the mechanics of a camera, I believe that nostalgia is the true meaning that fosters this bond between me and the inanimate. Nostalgia overpowers the static nature of an object, imbuing something as simple as a camera with meaning. Enough meaning for my cameras to become a series of artefacts, turning my bedroom into a museum of treasured images, memories, and a mosaic frieze of all the moments I have decided to keep with me.
Returning to the resurgence of ‘traditional’ cameras, I ask whether these trends reveal a nostalgia for more tangible, intentional forms of media creation—if this resurgence is a response to the rapid pace of digital consumption. Could the sensory aspects of film photography, for instance, create a more vivid or ‘authentic’ memory compared to smartphone photos? Do cameras, as material objects, foster a unique form of agency in the way they allow us to curate and construct our lives visually? How much control do we really have over our self-representation, if the technologies we use to capture our lives impose their own form of influence on us?
