A 1936 photograph, made with less computing power than your doorbell, feels heavy. This morning's technically perfect phone picture weighs nothing. Where did the weight go?

Start with Walker Evans, standing so long in front of a plain wooden storefront that the shopkeeper stops paying attention, then pressing the shutter once: closer to a signature on a document than a snapshot. Now your street corner this morning: before you've decided anything, the phone has decided everything, dozens of small corrections made by software that has never stood on a street corner and cared about it. Today is about that weight: where it went, and how you get it back. Not with a vintage costume, not with a filter named after a decade. By carrying the old soul.

The honest answer isn't a better camera, and it isn't even film, necessarily, though  ...