Analogue film photography is a working professional medium in cities such as Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, and New York. Portrait studios, wedding photographers, and event specialists in those places continue to work on film because the infrastructure that supports analogue workflows never disappeared. Labs stayed open, cinematographers kept shooting on film, universities continued teaching it, and creative industries carried on commissioning it as part of their normal practice. Film remained part of the working vocabulary rather than becoming a curiosity. I’ve worked throughout the UK, USA and Europe over the decades, and since the late 1990’s the differences have grown between countries and continents for very different reasons.

When an image is exposed on film, it isn’t yet a photograph. It lives invisibly in the emulsion, suspended between existence and nothingness — a latent ghost of light. At this stage it can still be erased, fogged, or lost entirely, but it is there, waiting. Only when it meets developer does it reveal itself, and only when it meets fixer is it frozen forever. That alchemy — the moment when something ephemeral becomes permanent — is what makes film different. Memory doesn’t just appear; it is conjured, stabilised, and preserved.