Beautiful Film Photography by Ramon Spaeti

Photography is one of man kind’s greatest breakthroughs. Before it, representations of the self or images of places you liked were a thing that only the well and truly upper class could afford, since the only people that could provide you with them were painters.
Photography changed all that, making images readily available for a much wider group of people, and eventually revolutionizing things like journalism and even art. Truly, we owe a lot of what is modern society to the invention of film.
But modern society is slowly turning its back on film. Not entirely without reason, mind you. Film requires resources to produce, and, whichever way you take it, digital is the smart choice. But there is no denying that film photography looks and feels completely different to its often times impersonal sister, digital photography.
Film photography is more personal and feels more permanent. The photo you get is the photo you get. It is not like you can go experimenting in Photoshop with different filters and see which one fits the picture best. Once you have decided what you are going to use, you are stuck with it. That’s why you have to have a very clear picture of how you want the photo to look, and really know how to produce that image in your head.
Usable photography dates back to the early 1820′s, when, in 1822,  Nicéphore Niépce produced the first photoetching. Sadly, the image was destroyed when attempts to create prints from were made. The oldest surviving photograph is View from The Window at Le Gras, which is also one of Niépce’s works, and was made in 1826 or 1827.
John Herschel was the first person to ever use the terms “photography”, “negative” and “positive” in this field, but the first person to actually make a negative was William Fox Talbot, who came up with a paper-based photographic method, which he made public in 1839. This method initially required hours of exposure to create an image, but after only one year, in 1840, the exposure time was reduced to minutes, making it comparable to the quickest method of that time, namely the daguerreotype, invented by Louis Daguerre.
Color photography took a while longer to make its debut on the scene. The Lumière brothers introduced the first commercially successful color method in 1907, dubbed Autochrome, and it is was used up until the 1950′s.
1935 saw the appearance of Kodachrome, a color method introduced by none other than Kodak, and 1936 was the year that brought us Agfacolor Neu, a method that closely resembles all the modern ones still in use to this day.
As we have mentioned earlier, modern society is turning its back to film photography, and embracing its new love, digital photography. There are, however, people out there producing Instragram-like photographs, using pre-Intragram methods of obtaining said images, namely the good old-fashioned film camera.
Today we will be showing you one such artist: Swiss photographer Ramon Spaeti.
Bases in Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, Ramon is a self-taught photographer, as well as a Design Director, graduating as a Design Engineer, and having an MBA in Industrial Design.
His passion for analog photography has lead him to exclusively use film cameras to take photos, and his main interest seems to be fashion photography.
His works have been published in some pretty cool magazine like Voltaire Magazine, Vogue Italia and Aesthetica Magazine, gaining him quite a bit of attention, and we would not call it unwarranted attention.
To show you what we mean, here a few of his works.

Get Stalked in Montmartre

These are some photos taken from a photoshoot he did for American Apparel in Paris. The model’s name is Daria.

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At times, fashion photography has to capture moments of intimacy, or at least pretend intimacy. You can see how well-suited film photography is for this. The pictures are grainy, unlike the high-definition digital cameras offer, but not unclear.
Of course, the artist has a huge role to play in how good the pictures come out. The artist is the imagination, after all, and his idea of “getting stalked in Montmartre” really comes across in the pictures, especially the one where you also see the photographer’s reflection in the window.

S Magazine

S Magazine is a biannual editorial focused on art, fashion and sensuality. It stands to reason that Ramon would have jumped at the chance to do a photoshoot for such an illustrious magazine, especially as his method of taking photos is so excellently suited for capturing all three of the magazine’s focus points.

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The model’s name is Christy, and Ramon’s grainy photos once again make you, the viewer, feel like you really are sharing a few brief moments with her. She isn’t looking at the camera for most of the pictures, which makes it seem like she is unaware that she is being photographed, which in turn makes the photos seem voyeuristic in nature.