In 2015, when I quit my job as the editor of a fashion magazine to study photography in Paris, I was a senior student. Very senior. Imagine my surprise then when my international classmates — aged mostly between 18 and 28 — were all shooting film, something I’d given up in 2006.
Like most photographers pre-digital era, however, I had shot slide, colour negative, and black and white film. I had push processed, cross processed, and even taken a course in film processing and printing. I thought I was stone age, except, as it turned out, that’s where the world now wanted to be.
Film processing at the Chennai Photo Biennale
As I was swept up in its wake — unearthing an old medium format twin lens reflex Yashica gifted by an uncle, its leather cover falling apart, and purchasing boxes of 120 Kodak…