Time Machines Made of Paper
Last year, at the Leipzig Book Fair - one of the larger literary gatherings in Europe - I picked up a book by Byung-Chul Han called Non-Things. I hadn’t come across his work before. The description on the back cover caught my interest, so I bought it almost on impulse and read it the same day, more or less in one stretch.
The book is a reflection on what the age of information does to people and to societies: how it affects our attention, our sense of what is real, and the way we relate to the world around us. Han makes a distinction between tangible things and information. Things, in his view, have something like a life of their own. They come into being, they change, they age, and eventually they disappear. Because they endure for a while and offer some resistance, we can form relationships with them. They can act as anchors, giving our lives a kind of framework and continuity.
Information, by contrast, is weightless and unstable. It has no real duration; it appears, circulates, and is replaced by something new almost immediately. It does not settle into our surroundings in the same way that a physical object does, and it does not offer the same sense of solidity.
A few days ago, this distinction came back to me quite vividly while I was looking through a stack of analog photo prints from a recent trip to the Maldives.
Being There Before You Press the Shutter
In the last years, I have gradually reduced my intake of everyday information. I stepped away from most social media and rolling news, especially after the start of the war in Ukraine, and I noticed that my attention slowly became a bit quieter. When I travel, I tend to go one step further. I avoid not only the obvious feeds and notifications, but often put aside music and casual reading as well. I keep a journal with me, and for the most part it is just that, the place itself, and my own thoughts.
The idea is not to become ascetic, but simply to give the surroundings a fair chance to register. If I fill every gap with some kind of input, very little of the actual place seems to stick.
When I later sat at my desk and went through the prints from the Maldives, I was surprised by how strong the associations were. Certain photographs brought back the feel of the warm air on my skin and the texture of the sand and water around my feet. Others reminded me of the particular smell of the sea at certain times of day, or of the soft light in the open‑roof bathroom where shade and reflections made quiet patterns on the floor in the afternoon.
Some images pulled up memories of taste - a meal on a specific evening - or of the music that played in the bar as the sun went down. Along with that came the mood I was in at the time, the kind of thoughts that were circling in the background, the general sense of being there.
It felt less like flipping through a collection of pictures and more like having a set of small, reliable doorways back into that period of time.
I noticed that I rarely, if ever, have the same kind of response when I scroll through the photos I take on my phone. And while my habit of going on an information fast when travelling certainly plays a role, it doesn’t fully explain the difference, because that habit developed before I started using a mechanical Nikon with film.
My sense is that two things are working together:
- the fact that during those trips I am mostly present, not constantly stepping out into virtual spaces, and
- the fact that, in Han’s terms, an analog photograph is a thing in the fullest sense.
Analog Photographs as Objects in the World
When Han writes about non‑things, he treats analog photographs as something more than just images. They are also objects: pieces of film, sheets of paper, physical items that can be lost, found, damaged, or handed from one person to another. They occupy space and they have a history.
An analog photograph has a small life cycle. Light from a particular scene passes through the lens and hits the film. The exposed film is developed, dried, cut, and eventually turned into prints. Those prints sit in a box, or in an album, or on a wall. Over the years they may fade slightly, pick up fingerprints, or bend at the corners. They age alongside the people who look at them.
Because of that, it becomes easier to relate to them as companions rather than as disposable artifacts. You remember not only what they show, but where they have lived: the drawer they were in, the move they survived, the times you leafed through them with someone else.
At the same time, an analog photo has a very direct connection to something that once existed in front of the lens. The light that touched that person or that landscape is the same light that darkened the grains of film. The print you hold is, in a fairly literal sense, a trace of that encounter between light and matter at a specific moment in time.
Digital photographs, by comparison, are representations in the form of data. The sensor measures light, translates it into numbers, and from then on you are mainly dealing with patterns inside memory chips and filesystems.
There is nothing wrong with that in itself - digital images are convenient, accessible, and often of impressive technical quality. But they behave differently. They do not age in the same visible way, and they do not inhabit your physical space in quite the same manner unless you take the extra step of printing them. You can have thousands of them in your pocket without feeling that you are carrying anything.
In practice, this makes it very easy to produce more than you can meaningfully relate to. It becomes normal to snap hundreds of pictures, upload a few, and forget most of the rest. The individual photo loses weight. It becomes one more entry in an endless stream.
When I compare that to opening a box of prints, I notice a difference in how my attention behaves. With the analog photos, I tend to slow down almost automatically. Each image invites a bit more time. The fact that there are relatively few of them, and that they have a physical history, seems to focus memory instead of diluting it.
Images Without a Past
The step from film photography to digital photography already changes our relationship to images. AI‑generated pictures add another layer. They can look strikingly realistic - the lighting, the composition, the details of faces and places - but they do not bear witness to a particular moment in the world.
No camera was pointed at a real scene. No person stood in exactly those clothes in exactly that place. The picture is a product of computation rather than a record of an encounter.
These images have many legitimate uses and can be impressive as tools and experiments. At the same time, they belong to what you could call a realm of pure appearance, where the link to lived experience is deliberately cut. If you spend most of your visual life in that realm, it becomes harder to rely on images as evidence that “this happened” or “I was there.”
For memory, that distinction seems to matter. When I look at an AI‑generated landscape, I may appreciate its aesthetics, but there is nothing to return to beyond the image itself. When I look at a slightly imperfect analog print from a morning walk, I feel the pull of a day I once lived.
The Quiet Logic of Old Photo Albums
Thinking about this has helped me understand why older people often treat their photo albums with such care. When an album comes out during a visit and someone starts telling stories, it is not just about showing pictures. It is about re‑entering episodes of life that have been preserved in a particular form.
Those albums have usually travelled through time with their owners. They have been taken down for family gatherings, put back on shelves, carried along when moving houses, and sometimes repaired when the binding started to fall apart. They are familiar as objects even before you look at the images inside.
When a person points at a faded photograph and starts to speak, I don’t think they are only constructing a narrative from memory. The presence of the print - its look, its smell, the way it has aged - supports the recollection. It offers just enough friction to bring the past into contact with the present.
The way we mostly use phones today is very different. It is not unusual to return from a holiday with hundreds or thousands of images, most of which we never revisit. The ease of capture makes each individual shot feel less significant. There is nothing special in pressing the button.
With film, by contrast, every frame has a cost and a physical limit attached to it. You usually think for a moment before pressing the shutter. You wait to finish the roll. You wait again for the development. The result is that when the prints finally arrive, there is a mild sense of occasion. They are not just the visual record of the trip, but also part of the story of how you chose to document it.
I notice that my own analog photographs come with that additional layer. They remind me not only of where I was, but also of the process of deciding that this particular moment was worth turning into a small object I could hold later.
Making Room for Things to Work on Us
For analog photographs - or any other physical mementos - to have this anchoring effect, it helps if there is some space in life where reality is allowed to register without constant interruption.
If my attention during a trip is mostly wrapped up in news updates, social feeds, and a steady background of media, then much of what happens around me is filtered through those layers. The experiences themselves become one more set of inputs, competing with everything else.
When I step back from that and give more of my attention to the place I am in - watching how the light changes over the course of the day, noticing the small noises in the background, paying attention to how I feel in different situations - the moments that end up on film carry more substance. There is more for the photograph to “hold on to.”
Later, when I look at a print, I am not only seeing an image. I am also reconnecting with a version of myself that was not yet busy turning the experience into content. That makes the photograph feel less like a trophy and more like a quiet conversation with another time.
This is not an argument against digital tools or against AI. Both are part of the world we live in, and both can be used in thoughtful ways. What I am interested in here is the counterweight that tangible things can provide in a culture defined by constant flow.
Analog photography happens to be one of the ways I cultivate that counterweight. For someone else it might be sketching, keeping a physical notebook, restoring old furniture, or tending a garden. In each case, you are spending time with something that exists in its own right, that changes slowly, and that resists instant replacement.
For me, small rectangles of paper with traces of light on them have become modest time machines. They do not offer perfect recall or objective truth, but they bring me close enough to past experiences that I can feel them again in my body, not just remember them in abstract. In a life surrounded by screens and streams of data, that feels worth cultivating.
