By — Apoorva Lakshmi Kaipa
Abstract
This article uses a personal object, a repaired Nikon Coolpix digicam, as a lens to examine the politics of memory and nostalgia. Drawing on research on selective recall and the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, this article argues that personal, imperfect memory is structurally honest in a way political nostalgia cannot be. Governments, populist movements and commercial culture all exploit the emotional power of the past that selectively archives what serves the present and erases the rest. This article traces how nostalgia functions less as sentiment and more as an instrument of control. The digicam revival among Gen Z is read as an implicit counter-movement to reclaim the unmediated, unalgorithmed memory in an age of surveillance and AI image processing.
Introduction
Last December, I got my parents to agree to get our old digital camera repaired. My parents did not understand why I was so adamant on using a camera to record important moments in my life instead of using my smartphone, which has better quality, is more convenient and faster. What I try to explain is the exact opposite of the appeal. Using a digicam forces you to capture the moment as it happens and does not give you the liberty of picking and choosing one of a hundred that you click the shutter. The joy I felt when the repaired camera came back in my hands was weirdly a lot. I went through all the photos that were still on it, and a wave of nostalgia passed over me. The happiness that I felt while I lived the moments that were captured by this point-and-shoot camera, which distilled whole memories into a single 16MP photo. This got me thinking. Why does this format feel so much more real?
The blurry images that were taken with this camera still have the background of the picture, something that personal nostalgia takes into account. Nostalgia is never neutral; it is always selective. Research confirms that nostalgic memories prioritise emotionally significant, positive events while filtering out what was dull or painful. Psychologists call this phenomenon rosy retrospection. My Nikon Coolpix remembers my life, but when political nostalgia comes into play, it filters out the inconvenient parts of the past while storing what works in favour of the present. Certain videos of mine have lost their audio; these memories are honest about what they lost. Political nostalgia usually is not.
Materiality of memory as resistance and control
Everyone would have heard the quote “History is written by the victors.” The irony of the quote is that Churchill, who is most often credited for the line, wasn’t the original one to say it. The misattribution is itself proof of the argument. Even our meta-narratives about who controls memory get distorted in transmission. Governments archive selectively. They elevate what is useful and bury what is inconvenient. A study published in Government and Opposition documents how states engineer political memory through libraries, museums, monuments and education; “By employing events in an affectively charged and mobilizing narrative, by selecting and excluding, history turns into political memory.”
Maurice Halbwachs, whose foundational theory of collective memory remains central to this field, argued that the past “is not preserved but reconstructed based on the present,” which means that memory is already a political act. Who controls the archive, controls the feeling. This is what makes political nostalgia so powerful and so dangerous. The imperfect memory feeling truer than polished reality cuts both ways. Personally, it grounds us, but politically it is weaponised.
My digicam performs as a counter archive. It provides an unglamorous, unedited version of my life. Blown-out flash and grainy images aren’t flaws that are tolerated but show the texture of authenticity. This is what Scholar Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, called reflective nostalgia, a mode of remembering that “dwells in algia (the longing itself)” and remains honest about its own incompleteness, as opposed to restorative nostalgia, which “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” and treats its own selective narrative as objective truth. My camera is reflective, but governments tend to be restorative.
Now, even this is being manufactured with the Fujifilm Instax Mini Evo Cinema Hybrid Instant Camera, which has an “era” dial which recreates the grain and the feel of old cameras all in one. Nostalgia is commodified. Boym anticipated this too. Writing about what she called “ersatz nostalgia”. This is the capitalist version, where you need not have lived through something to feel nostalgic for it. The past becomes a product. Transience itself gets a price tag.
When Nostalgia Becomes a Weapon
The political weaponisation of nostalgia is now extensively documented. A pan-European study published found that nostalgic rhetoric appeared in 8 out of 10 political party manifestos examined, concentrated overwhelmingly on cultural issues like identity, heritage and immigration, over economic policy. The authors concluded that nostalgia “could be seen as a device to obfuscate when a party lacks concrete solutions”. Another article found that far-right populist parties systematically exploit narratives of national decline and invoke a mythologised “founding moment” to mobilise voters through historical grievance.
The examples have been consistent. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” invokes an idealised mid-century America that was simultaneously a period of legal racial segregation. In Russia, research published documents how Putin’s return to the presidency crystallised an official policy against the “falsification of history” using memory as a legal and diplomatic tool to enforce a “notably selective state story” of World War 2 as heroic and unambiguous rather than the complex and often brutal record it actually was.
Brexit is perhaps the most studied case. Historian R. Saunders showed how the concept of “Global Britain” was identified by critics as a narrative of empire, invoking Britain’s former imperial authority while omitting the violence that sustained it. The LSE Brexit Blog concluded as early as 2017 that “Brexit is not only an expression of nostalgia for empire, it is also the fruit of empire.” Most strikingly, a 2025 survey study found that imperial nostalgia is “of comparable importance to economic values and immigration opinion” in predicting British voting behaviour. This proves that this is not only a cultural atmosphere, but a measurable driver of electoral outcomes.
This has been synthesised to draw a consistent conclusion: collective nostalgia “resonates most with those who have historical privilege, romanticising a time that was less diverse and less equitable.” Those of less historical privilege have such nostalgia, but it is outweighed by collective trauma. The Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs put it simply that what nostalgic political movements seek to preserve is not history but hierarchy.
The digicam revival itself is political
Our younger generation is choosing to go retro and use digicams making an implicit political statement about ownership of image and memory. The digicam revival is in part a reactionary reflex to surveillance increases in everyday lives. Film and early digital media couldn’t be hacked. They weren’t uploaded to a cloud whose servers can be lost or corrupted by external forces, nor did they help function and train AI models. A photo stored on an SD card cannot be remotely accessed without physical possession of the device.
Casey Fatchett, a professional photographer, noted that the smartphone’s invisible AI manipulation makes aggressive computational processing that makes images feel inauthentic even when they look pristine. The “flawed” digicam is perceived as more real precisely because it lacks that algorithmic hand. It has also been documented how users describe the choice as a deliberate act of technological intentionality, as a soft refusal of the ambient data-collection that governs modern life.
Conclusion
The blurry BlackBerry photo doesn’t lie about being blurry. But “the good old days” usually does. My grandfather passed away when I was ten. I have horrible memory, but when I look back at videos that have become grainy-looking after having 4k videos now, it makes me grateful that we have such videos safe on analogue. The grain isn’t a degradation of that memory. It is proof that the memory was real, that it was lived and that nobody went back to face tune or edit it. Political nostalgia never leaves the grain in. It airbrushes, curates and selects for the powerful and erases the rest. To conclude, the difference between a blurry photograph and political nostalgia is honesty. One admits what it has lost, and one never does.
About the author
Apoorva is a second-year student at JGLS majoring in business administration and law. She is an avid reader and artist, actively trying to incorporate creative fields into her everyday work.