Manifesto

Remember when ‘real’ was real?

At Blue Moon Camera and Machine, we seek to offer nothing less than the full restoration of your tactile sensibilities. Analog is more than tech, it is technique. It is a commitment to a lifestyle of rigor over ease, a deep connection to your craft and a knowledge of your process. We do what we do because we believe that analog is the antidote to the often overlooked compromises of an ever-automated world. A resuscitation from automation back into something more tangible; let your lungs swell as you inhale deep. We resist the growing separation between the maker and the tools, the lit fuse of planned obsolescence, and the homogeny of practice.

We trust in analog machines for their built-in durability and patience. A typewriter might wait its entire life to participate in poignant prose. A film camera idles ready beneath your fingers as you finally release the shutter on the moment observed together. In these fleeting glimpses of significance, these machines are ready for you, and therein lies their beauty – they always have been and they always will be. Analog machines come into our lives as collaborators, co-conspirators for a lifetime of process and product. You can credibly use your analog machine for your entire life and not once will it reboot, not once will it upgrade against your will, never will it force you up a brand new learning curve. By using a machine that will inevitably outlast you, your skills improve with each subsequent project. This permits you the necessary time together to learn each other‘s nuances, coming to an intimacy in tandem. Of course, nothing lasts forever, but an analog device has the tendency to absorb and sustain the experience applied to it, pulling this energy onwards to the next project. This is a slow and rambling dialogue; we want you to listen to it.

At our shop, we consider the notion that everything in life is either convenient or it is of quality. The suffering for it, the sacrifice in making work when it is not automatic or easy, that is the hallmark of work that is good. When the shop got its start in 2001, we were working through our lunches – darting from the darkroom to the hot plate in the bathroom to cook discount hot dogs between runs of film. We began as a staff of two, stubborn – with our heels dug in – standing in defense of analog at the start of the digital revolution. We are now a staff of over twenty anachronists, revelling in the film renaissance. We remain unwilling to give up on 150 years of mature technology simply because the industry around us has evolved into something more disposable, less appreciable. Our staff is comprised of artists, educators, technicians, disc jockeys, and entrepreneurs. We are all fighters, working to honor the principles of diligence, passion for craft, and integrity.

Due to its longevity, there will always be film; as long as there is film, there will always be us.