The Beth Edges//"Colours Collide"

I love everything about this. The classic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-bridge-chorus structure, the crispy guitars, the snappy drums, the bouncy pop-rock "oh-oh-oh-oh"s, and the gorgeous and colorful video, comprised of hundreds of lomographs that were submitted to the band as part of a contest I believe.

I've always been a big fan of film photography (it's how I learned), and actually rediscovered my love of it a couple years back through lomography. Though the term has come to be used interchangeably with all "analogue" film photography lately, the technical definition is "analogue" photographs taken with cheap plastic toy cameras and/or with expired film with the expressly stated purpose of taking photographs with intentionally surprising, occasionally wonky results.

But whatever. To try to label it defeats the purpose. I love it all and really do think it will make a comeback, not just with the hipsters and the "weird" kids but with everybody. I think it won't happen in this generation, but in the next one, when people look back on today and wonder, seriously wonder, why there are seemingly so few truly iconic moments or personalities to define this generation, and also wonder why they're recollection of these times are so...small. And square. And orange. And washed out and fuzzy - not in any real, organic, warm sense but in a computer algorithmically everything-looks-exactly-the-same sense. And why all we can remember is food. And feet. And bathroom mirrors.

And though it's all related, I think the mere fact that a photograph "exists" gives it an automatic step-up in importance, regardless of subject matter. There was a time when taking a picture was a little more involved than simply pointing your phone at a mirror. You had to acquire a camera. You had to get film. You had to know how to open and load your camera, how to wind and rewind. God help you if you needed a flash (especially in earlier times when you needed to worry about bulbs or cubes). You had to wait until you finished a whole roll before you could look at any of them, and then only after sending them into a shop and having to wait an hour, or a week, or weeks to get them back. Or, if you dared, develop them yourself, if you had access to the right space, lights, projectors, paper, chemicals. And with each roll, you knew you only had a limited number of chances to get a good shot, before you had to start the process all over again. Not even mentioning the expense involved in all this. Things were once not so instant, not so...disposable.

So what does it mean? It means that every time you pick up a photograph, you're picking up an image that somebody probably put a lot of thought into. No matter what the subject matter, no matter where you find it, whether it's from your grandmother's wedding or if it's just a stranger's loose vacation snapshot found at the bottom of a thrift store cabinet, every time you pick up or look at a photograph you can't help but wonder, who took this, and why? What does it say, what were they trying to say, and how closely do the two match up?

Unless, you know, they were just fiddling with it and the shutter went off.

Still, you never know.