WHY ANALOG PHOTOGRAPHY NOW?

Craig Jun Li at Chapter NY

Craig Jun Li, Untitled, pigmented silicone, iron oxide, altered dye-diffusion transfer prints, SX-70 film cartridge spring, medical tape, archival mounting tape, artist's frame, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York, NY. Photo: Charles Benton.

My short review of Craig Jun Li’s exhibition I Want to Love with No Fear at Chapter NY is out in the March issue of ArtReview:

Why analogue photography now? One response might be that conspicuously rematerializing the image – printing on unconventional materials, or capturing the projector’s immaterial light – restores some of photography’s indexical function, its ‘trace of the real,’ that has been lost since the advent of digital media. Another could be that film photography provides an approachable model, as it does in Flusser’s writings, to begin considering the far more confounding ‘black boxes’ structuring contemporary life. Flusser’s metaphor of the camera is just that, a metaphor, and so is Li’s – it scales.

You can read the rest here.