Film photography is coming back. Can manufacturers keep up?

Baltimore—Lev Bar-av was done developing film. It was 2014, and the owner of National Photo, a print and photo services shop just outside Baltimore, threw away the refrigerator-size machine he had used for years to develop customers’ film. “I pushed it out of the back of the store and let the rain fall on it,” he recalls. “I was just done. And I thought I’d washed my hands of this stuff for the last time.”

The shop was down to just one regular customer for film development—a Holocaust survivor and hobby photographer named Albert Lapidus, Bar-av says. “Occasionally I still had a few other customers, but the business had dwindled so much, it was impossible for us to keep the chemistry fresh,” he says. Rather than turn away a friend, neighbor, and loyal customer, Bar-av would drive Lapidus’s rolls to the city’s other remaining local shop, Techlab Photo.

Digital photography had eaten analog’s lunch. Professional-grade cameras could reliably deliver image quality at least as good as what film offered—without the wait or expense of wet development processes. Compact digital cameras and then cell phones similarly supplanted disposables, instant print cameras like Polaroid, and casual point-and-shoot film models. Even Lapidus started asking if he should switch to digital, Bar-av says.

The change rocked the firms that had enjoyed decades of healthy profits manufacturing photographic film and chemicals. Fujifilm pivoted to chemicals and materials for other markets, including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and electronic coatings. Eastman Kodak, which had spun off its chemical business in 1994, declared bankruptcy in 2012.

The same dynamic played out worldwide at photography businesses up and down the supply chain. Firms consolidated, went digital, changed their core products entirely, or closed. Kodak, Fujifilm, and others demolished or repurposed a lot of their film and chemical manufacturing plants.

But film didn’t die. The market shrunk sharply and stabilized at a new, smaller size. And then, defying most predictions, film began to grow again. “I would say interest in film since circa 2020 has more than tripled,” says Matt Growcoot, senior news editor at the photography magazine PetaPixel. “It’s quite an astonishing comeback.” In fact, the resurgence of analog photography has been strong and stable enough that legacy manufacturing equipment is at capacity and companies are investing again to keep up with demand.

Some photographers never left film or are coming back, but the strongest growth is coming from younger people picking up a dedicated camera for the first time. “A lot of it is to do with Gen Z coming of age; they like an imperfect aesthetic,” Growcoot says.

Film photography finds a new normal

Techlab Photo closed in 2017, and Bar-av bought its automated film developer for $1,000. With the combined customer base of both shops, he was able to keep his developing chemicals fresh and the aging Fujifilm machine busy.

The trend built slowly from there and then really picked up during the pandemic, Bar-av says. “People were slowing things down. They were stuck at home and seeing the value of prints, looking at the past, looking at old stuff, and getting re-enamored with analog.”

About 10 years after Bar-av tried to leave analog photography out in the rain, enough people were coming in with film that it made sense for him to buy a brand-new color development machine from a German company called Colenta Labortechnik. A year or so later, he says, the shop added another, for black-and-white film. “We’ve invested over $100,000 in the past 2 years,” he says. Film services now account for 70% of National Photo’s business, Bar-av says, including scanning negatives into digital image files.

The chemistry of film

Analog photography uses chemistry to turn light into a permanent image. The materials and reactions used by most photographers have stayed largely the same since Kodak introduced the C-41 process for color imaging in the 1970s. Walk through the chemistry of film photography from exposure to a final image with this look at the two most common processes in use today. Commercial film development machines go through the same steps as the do-it-yourself process described here.

Light

Light

Step 1: Exposure
	B&W Film contains microscopic crystals of silver halide (AgX, where X = chloride, bromide, or iodide in various ratios) suspended in gelatin. When the camera shutter snaps, the film is briefly exposed to light. Photons strike the crystals and create small defects where the AgX is reduced to elemental silver, forming a latent image. The elemental silver is present as tiny imperfections on crystals too small to see with the naked eye.
	Color C-41 color film is more complex than black and white. It has multiple layers of gelatin-AgX emulsions sensitized differently to pick up red, green, and blue photons separately. Those layers are separated by filters that block unwanted light of a specific color from leaking through and exposing the wrong color-sensitive layers.

Inside a light-proof bag or a pitch-black room, the exposed film is removed from its metal cassette and loaded onto a spool where it is bathed in development chemicals. The spool then goes into a specialized drum called a developing tank that lets liquid in and out but prevents light from getting inside.

Step 2: Developer bath
	B&W Developers are electron-donating molecules that reduce AgX crystals to elemental silver, which shows up as dark areas. The elemental silver defects created by the reaction with light act as catalysts, dramatically speeding up the reaction in areas that were exposed to more light.
	Color In color film, the oxidized developer chemicals undergo coupling reactions with dye precursor molecules immobilized in each layer alongside the AgX crystals. Here again, elemental silver makes the reactions proceed much faster in exposed areas. Precise control of temperature and agitation is critical when developing color film. Black-and-white is more forgiving.

Step 3: Stop bath
	B&W Developers work only in an alkaline chemical environment, so removing the developer solution and pouring in an acid stops the reactions. An acetic acid solution about half the strength of household vinegar is the most common choice.
	Color The stop bath for color is usually stronger stuff, sulfuric acid at a pH around 1, in part to better penetrate all the layers. The timing must be precise. Waiting too long or not long enough before adding the stop bath can easily ruin a roll.

Step 4: Fixer bath
	B&W Ammonium thiosulfate or sodium thiosulfate “fixes” the image, making it permanent by reacting with the remaining AgX. Though AgX is insoluble in water, silver thiosulfate readily dissolves into the bath as it forms. Used fixer solution contains silver, which commercial photo labs are required to harvest for recycling.
	Color Fixing color film involves oxidizing metallic silver back to AgX—a step called bleaching—and removing AgX with a thiosulfate salt. Some versions of the process combine both steps using a “blix” solution that includes oxidizers and thiosulfate, though blix expires more quickly than separate bleach and fix baths.

After a plain water wash, the images on the film are permanent and the film comes out to dry. C-41 and black-and-white produce negative images. Slide film, which yields a positive image, is more complex but can use the same equipment.

With negatives in hand, a photographer can make wet prints in a darkroom by shining light through the developed film onto photo paper that uses similar chemistry. More often these days, the film is scanned into a computer and printed from a digital image file.

Exposed film

Developing tank

Kay Youn/C&EN/Shutterstock, scroll animation by Kay Youn

Sources: Cheng Lu, Joe Giordano, Eastman Kodak, Lomography, Encyclopedia of Applied Electrochemistry (Tadaaki Tani 2014, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-6996-5_492)

Printing has mostly gone digital, especially in color, without a comparable analog renaissance. A cadre of artists and hobbyists still print black-and-white with wet, analog chemistry. But the most common workflow for photographers is to have their film developed with chemicals and digitally scanned, Bar-av says, a service that runs $16–$35 per roll, depending on the resolution the customer wants for the image files. A high-quality inkjet printer prints the images the photographer wants.

It’s not just Baltimore getting back into film. In 2022, Kodak vice president Nagraj Bokinkere told news outlets near the firm’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, that it had hired more than 300 people in the preceding year to run its film production lines there and that it was looking for about 75 more. The firm had quadrupled its output by moving from a single shift to 24/7 operation, he said.

That was still not enough to meet the demand. In 2024, Kodak carried out a major renovation of the Rochester plant that included a 5-week shutdown while crews worked on equipment used in light-sensitive process steps. The firm didn’t disclose how much it spent on the improvements but said in its 2025 annual report that it will need to invest further if demand for film keeps growing.

But Kodak is a shadow of its former self. In film’s heyday, the firm employed 75,000–90,000 people. Now it’s down to just 3,500, having shed hundreds of jobs most years since emerging from bankruptcy in 2013.

Film manufacturers don’t disclose how many rolls they sell or how many meters of film roll off their production lines each year. Kodak’s 2025 annual report does, however, offer some clues about how the film photography business is performing financially. Consumer photography film has represented about a third of the sales of its chemical and materials division in recent years, the report says. In turn, that division brought in about 30% of Kodak’s total sales in 2025 and 63% of its profits. Overall, the numbers suggest that Kodak’s film sales are in the neighborhood of $100 million per year.

Competitors also see film as a market worth investing in. In 2024, The UK film and chemical manufacturer Harman-Ilford says it spent millions of dollars on two new machines to make the little round metal cassettes that hold 35 mm film at its plant near Manchester, England. “We’re seeing new people fall in love with film photography every day,” Harman managing director Greg Summers said in a press release.

The firm says it is planning additional investments to expand its capacity in the coming years. “Manufacturers are battling old machinery and processes, and replacement parts that just don’t exist anymore,” Summers said. “We’re taking a huge leap to address that with this investment.”

In addition to Kodak and Harman-Ilford, big film producers are China’s Lucky Film and Germany’s Orwo, according to photographer Joe Giordano. Fujifilm-brand film is still available, though it’s made by other companies.

Film for movies has had its own renaissance in recent years. Films actually shot on film captured the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Cinematography in both 2025 and 2026, and film was the medium of choice for a big chunk of the nominated movies.

The chemistry of movie and camera film are mostly the same, and many movie cameras use a 35 mm format that is physically the same as the film used by photographers. The main difference is that movie film has a black backing layer, called remjet, that reduces interference from light reflected within the camera and protects the film from the rigors of being run at high speed for hundreds of meters at a time.

Making the wet chemistry that develops film and prints

Only two companies currently make development chemicals at significant scale: Fujifilm in Belgium and Photo Systems in Dexter, Michigan.

Those suppliers serve both commercial shops like National Photo and the darkrooms set up in basements, artist studios, and schools. Photography has always had a DIY streak, a subset of the community that likes chemicals almost as much as it likes cameras and lenses.

With a bit of training and a modest set of equipment, anyone can learn to develop their own film at home in a light-tight bag, says Giordano, who also teaches developing as part of the photography curriculum at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Wet printing takes a dedicated darkroom, but the magic of watching an image appear in the developer bath has kept enough photographers in the habit to sustain a stable supply of photo paper and print development chemicals.

The process draws in new people too. “I have to write a lot of late passes because the students don’t want to leave the darkroom,” Giordano says.

Alan Fischer, the founder and CEO of Photo Systems, says his firm has been the manufacturer behind Kodak-branded chemicals for about 5 years. It also has its own brand, Unicolor, and several other private-label deals, such as the powder-format black-and-white chemicals sold under the Ilford brand and the small-batch kits sold by CineStill. “We manufacture for people all over the world,” he says.

Being one of the last firms standing has its advantages in terms of market share, Fischer says, but a smaller ecosystem also means a less robust supply chain. China is now the only country of origin for two reducing agents and a chelator used in color development, for example, and four reducing agents used in black-and-white are made only in India.

“There’s no domestic supply,” Fischer says. “Some of the other critical chemicals are the same way. The supply chain is much longer than it used to be, where we could just order what we wanted and get it in 2 or 3 days.”

Vendors sell development chemicals as bottles of aqueous solution or bags of powder. That means they have fewer bottlenecks to increasing production compared with film, a complex material with 12 or more layers that have to be laid down at consistent thicknesses for kilometers at a time.

Fischer says Photo Systems’ sales volumes have risen by about 50% since about 2021. He has hired four additional people so the firm can make longer production runs on the same equipment. “Any photochemistry manufacturer—whether it’s Fujifilm, us, or anybody else—it’s a boutique business,” he says. “It’s sort of a known art, and the whole key to doing it well is repeatability of ingredients and processes.”

Fischer says he’s comfortable making hires and investing in modest upgrades to his Michigan plant because the return of analog photography has the markings of a durable trend. He and others watching the industry cite the strong uptake by younger people, as well as the parallels between film and the return of analog music sales. “I think it’s very, very similar to vinyl records, which also appear to be quite durable,” he says.

Increased demand, paired with a constrained supply of film, has driven prices up, as has an increase in the price of silver, the photosensitive element at the heart of analog photography. But costs are still within the range of what people spend on other hobbies or what artists spend on materials, Fischer says.

Why people are going retro for their photos

Disposable cameras are another big part of the analog revival. At a sold-out concert in Manchester, England, last month, pop star Harry Styles banned cell-phone photography and handed out 20,000 disposable film cameras. The results that popped up on social media were less than impressive, artistically, Growcoot reported for PetaPixel. But the point was to make people slow down and drink in the moment instead of firing off a burst of forgettable cell-phone footage. It certainly got pop fans and photographers talking, and it generated hundreds of news articles and thousands of social media posts debating the pros and cons of analog.

The bottom end of the market is driving the film resurgence as well, Fischer says. “The very inexpensive toy camera that’s a disposable, that gives you out-of-focus pictures and maybe good or maybe bad exposures. They like to experiment. Some of the results you’d say are garbage, but people like it.”

Fujifilm’s QuickSnap brand of disposable cameras started trending in mid-2019, says Bing Liem, who leads the firm’s imaging division in North America. The company boosted its output recently by adding additional shifts at the South Carolina factory where it assembles the cameras for global distribution.

Instant cameras are also driving growth and motivating investment in new manufacturing, Liem says. Fujifilm announced in December that it would spend more than $30 million to upgrade a factory near Tokyo where it makes cartridges for Instax cameras, which use color film chemistry to produce a finished print in seconds. By the end of 2026, he says, the improvements will boost capacity at the site by 10%.

It’s not uncommon now to see event and street photographers carry an instant camera along with their other gear so they can hand their subjects a print on the spot as a keepsake. “From our research, we’ve learned that Gen Z especially is drawn to the nostalgia, tangibility, and unfiltered nature of analog photography,” Liem says.

Film is also edging back into the professional work of artists and photojournalists. In addition to his teaching work, Giordano shoots for newspapers and magazines. On one recent afternoon, he was working on a photo he took on assignment for Baltimore magazine. Shot on film, the photo opened a profile of the engineer leading the effort to rebuild Maryland’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed in 2024 when it was struck by a cargo ship.

Many editors won’t put up with the quirks and wait-time of film, Giordano says, so he’ll use digital cameras. But more and more of the outlets he works with like the look he gets on film, as do the people in the photos, he says. When he’s taking photos for art and for fun, it’s all analog at this point. There too, the audience is into it. Giordano just wrapped up a 3-month gallery exhibit, “The Secret City: Works on Color Film,” at the Peale Museum.

Using film, and teaching analog photography to others, makes the craft more intentional and meditative, Giordano says. “It forces me to slow down and appreciate the work.”

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