Arianne Kelley Media — Field Notes / Essays
DOC.003 — Grandmas in Bikinis
On analog media, memory, and why I bring a Hi8 camcorder to your wedding instead of a crew.
I went home to Bloomington, Indiana the first week of April to search through my closet for some old photos I printed out in high school. (Also, why don't we print photos anymore? I wanna leave a legacy! If my kids aren't searching through piles of stuff and learning about my dark and torrid past, then I don't want it!) On my search I found something else: my old Nintendo DS Nintendogs device. Yes, there's a paw print on the front. Yes, it turned on immediately and I played a game of Mario Kart. I did not have to plug it in and charge it. It has definitely not been touched since I was in middle school, maybe before? This struck me as not only a miracle but also invoked in me a certain kind of nostalgia that feels really prominent in pop culture right now.
While I was home I also visited my grandma. She was widowed in 2021. Something I never fully appreciated about her until recently was how much of a record keeper and journalist she was. While I visited, she pulled out a photo album. A family member had recently died and we were going through photos to put in the obituary and the slideshow they play at funerals. We found so much. The photos were disorganized, weathered, delicate, and totally out of chronological order. But there they were: the cars, the moments, the hairstyles, my family who I had only ever known with wrinkles were staring at me young and dancing. For some reason my grandma liked to document the houses they were living in. I guess they moved around a lot. And oh my god, thank god she did. The relics and snapshots of life!! Cigarette boxes discarded on the table 6 inches away from the same figurines that are still in her curio cabinet. A group of strangers on a blanket at Lake Lemon, my mom as a 7-year-old in a bikini. MY GRANDMA IN A BIKINI!! She had a blond bob that was at least 5 inches taller than her forehead to go to the lake… Most of these photos were just the quotidian use of 35mm film. Pleasant and not precious at the time. But today they feel priceless. Then she pulled out a giant Sterilite tote of VHS tapes. And another one of Super 8 reels. My little box of photos from 2014 are nothing compared to this. There were dead people talking to me. This is history. And that's why I'm bringing a Hi8 camcorder to your wedding and asking people questions.
I make wedding documentaries on Hi8 camcorders for couples who want to make some memories. There are two reasons I think what I do is not only a great idea and a valuable artifact but something the world wants more of: First, wedding media is now all about social media performance, and this performance has cheapened our experience and corrupted truth, memory, and ultimately history. Second, the analog revival is here and it's mainstream. These two are connected because this truth famine made us crave real life again, media ownership, real memories and experiences uninterrupted by ads. The solution to that craving is analog media. Analog media preserves something real. The Instagram version of your wedding will be forgotten but the analog version is history.
The wedding media industry has been overrun by that slow-motion "cinematic" wedding videography creative. While beautiful, this high production value often comes at the cost of the real moments for the couples. Recently, I have seen stories of brides publicly sharing that they regret the overbearing nature of videographers directing and staging shots that perform for the video because they're interfering with the integrity of the emotional moments themselves. Couples are recognizing that the need to share on social media, and thus perform for it in real life, should not compromise their most important rituals and intimate moments. Not only that, but the real storytelling is lost and thrown out in favor of a reproduction that we will share for the third-person nameless viewer online. And for what? The initial motivation for publicizing your life on social media comes from the potential that your stuff will go viral and you will eventually profit from that virality, either monetarily or socially.* And commodifying your most special moments does feel very cheap. And this is coming from a wedding videographer, it's literally how I make my money. But when you watch your wedding video in 20 years, do you want to see a slow-mo supercut of you and your partner walking through a garden, or do you wanna hear what your grandma decided to share in an interview? This can be especially potent if grandma is no longer with us in 20 years. Weddings aren't just about Instagram and vendors and a 65 billion dollar industry. They're also about families and connection, history and legacy. You cannot connect with your guests or your partner or be present for them while you're performing for a camera and getting bossed around by a videographer.
* The reality of this potential profit is much like a slot machine at a casino. Yeah, anything could happen and there is a small initial payoff in the form of likes and attention, but you rarely hit the jackpot. What does it say about our culture right now that we feel we have a better chance at playing and winning slots than engaging with the people around us?
I believe the revival of analog media is here, and it has been here for a while. This resurgence has finally surpassed just the A/V community nerding out over a certain look and has graduated to mainstream. Here are some examples of the accumulation:
All these examples could just be aesthetic choices, sure. But these aesthetic choices point to something a little deeper going on in our current culture. The analog revival is about how people are trying to redefine their relationship with media and technology. And it tells us about what's actually important to them.
There's this idea that's been floating around the internet that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are creators but as time goes on they will become curators. Curation is becoming the new creation. Your taste, your offline library, your record collection is the new flex. It's no longer about what you made but what you chose and what you know. Spotify Wrapped kind of does this, it tries to show off taste and numbers like "let me prove to you how much I listen to this super cool artist you've never heard of. Let me show that I'm a Swiftie." As culture shifts so does the meaning of status. This is both a practical rejection of subscriptions and ads AND a status signal. Being offline with a good collection means something now in a way it didn't before.
"My jazz collection's great, I can play almost anything."
She is our nostalgia queen and probably at least 80% responsible for the whole 'film look' takeover that's still prominent today. She was already savvy to the greater points of this entire essay.
With these examples I'd like to illustrate that the analog media resurgence is a reaction to the Instagrammification of the world and our intimate moments. These "cinematic videos" just get forgotten at the bottom of your Instagram feed, couples never watch them again, replaced by the next big thing in your life. Which at a glance tells a great story. But you don't live your own life at a glance. My grandma's VHS tapes are more true than your Instagram supercut. And I think brides want what is more true than not. And how do we get that? Well we use what was cool 20 years ago: camcorders, flip phones, mp3 players, no internet, freedom, something closer to true than not.
Every generation romanticizes the past. Isn't nostalgia always just 20 years old? My sister said:
"The nostalgia cycle is changing finally to a time we lived through and remember and that's scary and comforting at the same time. For the past 10-12 years it's been '90s millennial memories that we never experienced but enjoyed living through and now it's things we actually lived through so it's much more visceral."
She's right and the nostalgia objection is right, to a certain degree. It's finally time for the people who were born at the turn of the century to grow up and get married, so they want what the big kids had back then. The ideas about what significance looks like are solidified at an early age. And so all the cool girls getting married right now probably solidified that meaning about 20 years ago. But I think there is something deeper here that we have never seen before.
Instagram, TikTok, even LinkedIn and just the internet in general have caused such an erosion of the real by the virtual that it's finally corrupted and commodified intimate moments like we have never seen before and we don't want it to continue. Remember when the next iPhone would come out and it would just be miles ahead of the last one? Then somewhere around 5-10 years ago it started to be like "ehh yeah well it kind of just can't get much better than this." We are no longer optimizing for the fastest, smartest, most cinematic, most viral thing. We want the real thing again.
And I think for a lot of people the last time things were actually real was maybe the '90s and 2000s. Before ads and streaming and subscriptions took over everything and cell phones were just for calls and funny texts. You had to wait for Smallville to come out on The CW each week. Camcorders are real, and my grandma's photo book is real, and her VHS tapes are real, and mundane and unposed moments are real. We are realizing we can actually have that again.
You know when you throw something in the junk drawer you don't really think about it. But later something in there becomes really important. One time I found an actual chicken nugget in my junk drawer. Don't know how old it was. It made me laugh, I must've dropped it looking for some BBQ sauce. This tells a story. I wanna see your junk drawer because it tells a story. And that story is always way better than the curated detail slow motion shots from your wedding that Connor with his Ronin Gimbal got on 8k with a telescoping alpha sigma beta box light.
I've had this unwavering appreciation and love for the benign mundane moments of the human experience since I was young. I printed off a box of photos in high school because I knew one day I was gonna want to hold them instead of sort through dead laptops and junk to revive the most precious moments of my history. When I found the Nintendo DS it was not because I was looking for it but because I was looking for something else. Some junk can be revived and it feels like time traveling. The Nintendo DS allowed little me to talk to me today.
When I told my friend Anna we need to print a bunch of Snapchat memories at 2 Hour Photo from CVS, I could not have predicted the moment with the Nintendo DS or that I'd find it because of the photos I was searching for 12 years later. When I found the photos they were with the binder I never inserted them into. I did forget to finish that project, but that also tells a story. Some of the photos are really stupid but it's kind of cool because for some reason that I cannot remember, I felt like they deserved to be printed out. And I'm gonna respect that choice of my former self. The unposed, unintentional, mundane thing becomes the precious thing. You cannot manufacture that. You have to discover your grandma in bikinis later.
And yeah maybe nothing in the junk drawer really matters and some of those photos aren't really that important. But just like my grandma's photo album, it's messy but it's true, and at least the story we find in excavating it will be the real one, or close to it. I always knew that this moment here will never happen again, and that is precious, divine, and totally mundane. Maybe no one will remember it. But it still happened. It's still part of history.
So it's true your wedding day is just another day the sun rises and sets. But also how absolutely amazing. You just happened to be wearing a really expensive white dress. And don't you want your grandkids to know what grandma had to say in her expensive white dress?
If any of this resonated with you — the home movies, the honesty, the idea that your wedding day should sound like your wedding day — I'd love for you to check out what I do.