Film photography was part of Felipe Tofani’s family long before it became a deliberate practice of his own. His great-grandmother was a photographer. His grandfather travelled with a Nikon. Tofani himself carried film cameras in the early 2000s before digital photography seemed to make the older process unnecessarily slow and complicated.
Years later, those same qualities became the reason to return.
Years later, the slowness he once dismissed became the reason to return.
Returning through a disposable camera
The shift happened during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Tofani read a photographer friend describing disposable-camera photographs as a kind of time travel: by the time the roll returned from the lab, the images belonged to another period of life.
Locked down and acutely aware of time, Tofani found the idea convincing. In summer 2020 he returned to film through disposable cameras.
Against the polished sameness
Part of the attraction was also dissatisfaction with contemporary image culture. Too much photography, he felt, had become over-edited, over-produced and visually similar.
Film introduced variables rather than removing them. Camera, lens, stock, light and development all interact, and the same subject can emerge differently depending on the combination. Tofani values that experimental openness more than the promise of a perfectly repeatable result.
The Mamiya he found in London
Medium format had fascinated him for years but seemed too expensive and technically remote. Twin-lens reflex cameras were especially attractive, and the Mamiya C330 became a particular obsession after he learned Diane Arbus had used one.
Online prices kept the camera out of reach. Then a work trip took him to London in 2022. He turned the visit into a search through camera shops and eventually found a C330 within his budget.
The camera became his first “proper” film camera and one of the objects most strongly connected to his relationship with the medium.
Berlin through repeated routes
Tofani has lived in Berlin long enough for photography to become less about discovering the city once than noticing how quickly it changes.
He returns to favourite walking routes and watches shops close, people appear, and seasonal light alter familiar streets. Tempelhofer Feld and the cemeteries around Südstern are recurring places because their quieter atmosphere gives him room to experiment without feeling observed.
Over time, repetition creates visual knowledge. Certain places reveal themselves differently in certain seasons. Street-photography spots become familiar. What changes is not only the city, but the photographer’s ability to recognise its patterns.
What changes is not only the city, but the photographer’s ability to recognise its patterns.
The roll returns as memory
Waiting remains central. Sometimes months pass before a roll is developed. By then the details of the day have begun to fade, and scanning the negatives becomes a reconstruction.
Recently Tofani has started developing black-and-white film at home. Bringing another part of the process under his own hands has deepened the relationship further: photography becomes not only an exposure but a chain of decisions and physical work.
Finding your own way
After years of photographing Berlin, Tofani is reluctant to claim that photography necessarily makes someone understand a city “better.” It may simply make the city more personally legible.
You recognise patterns, know which light belongs to which season, find places you want to return to and slowly build routes that feel like your own.
That idea also runs through more than a decade of writing on his blog about Berlin, travel and photography. Looking and writing become parallel ways of inhabiting a place.
Perhaps that is the value of the slower process he once dismissed: film does not only record where he has been. It gives him enough time to realise how a city has become his.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind photographic practice.
