For Miguel Inzunza, analogue photography is becoming a way to slow down, pay closer attention and preserve the everyday moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Slowing Down Enough to Notice
Photography has been present in Miguel Inzunza’s life for as long as he can remember. As a child, he played with the family camera. Later, he received an instant camera for Christmas and used it to photograph the people around him. Over time, cameras changed, but the instinct remained: to look at ordinary life and decide that something inside it was worth keeping.
Now, as he explores analogue photography more deliberately, the process is teaching him something beyond technique. Film asks him to wait. It asks him to commit to an image without immediately knowing whether it worked. Most importantly, it asks him to pay attention before pressing the shutter.
People in the middle of life
Miguel is especially drawn to people interacting with one another: family, friends and the small exchanges that happen naturally in public places. Rather than separating people from their surroundings, he photographs them inside the situations they already inhabit.
That interest makes analogue photography particularly useful. A roll has limits. There is no endless sequence of nearly identical frames and no screen asking for immediate evaluation. The decision happens first; the result comes later.
For Miguel, this makes composition more deliberate and the moment itself more present.
A camera children do not understand
Carrying an analogue camera has also made him aware of how quickly the cultural meaning of a camera has changed.
Children notice the object hanging from his neck. On one occasion, after he took a photograph, they immediately wanted to see the image. Miguel had to explain that there was nothing to show them yet. The photograph was inside the camera, latent and invisible, waiting for the film to be developed.
Their confusion stayed with him. For a generation accustomed to images appearing instantly, the basic rhythm of film can seem almost strange: make the picture now, discover it later.
That delay is precisely part of what Miguel values.
The sleepy dog
One of his favourite photographs so far is not a dramatic scene. It is a picture of his dog sleeping in the way he often sleeps.
The importance of the image comes from its familiarity. Nothing exceptional needed to happen. The photograph simply recognised that an ordinary gesture, repeated every day, would not remain ordinary forever.
This is one of photography’s quiet powers for Miguel: freezing moments that daily life makes easy to overlook.
Colour for life, black and white for ideas
Colour and black and white play different roles in the way he thinks about images. For everyday photography, he is naturally attracted to colour. It belongs to the atmosphere of places and to the immediate experience of being there.
But colour can also become information. Sometimes it competes with what Miguel wants an image to communicate. In those situations, black and white feels more direct: a way to remove one layer and concentrate on an idea, gesture or relationship.
Neither approach is more authentic to him. They simply ask different questions of the scene.
When a photograph becomes nostalgia
A photograph does not have to feel important when it is made. Miguel believes that almost any image can acquire weight with time, because eventually it becomes connected to a version of life that no longer exists in exactly the same way.
The photograph returns you to the moment in which it was taken. People change. Places change. Relationships change. Even the photographer who looks back at the image is no longer quite the same person.
That distance turns photographs into nostalgia.
Documenting the everyday
At the moment, Miguel is not trying to force his photography into a grand project. He is documenting everyday life and trying to become better at seeing and making pictures.
That openness is part of the work. Family, friends, streets, public spaces and small accidents can all become material. The challenge is not finding extraordinary subjects; it is becoming attentive enough to recognise when something ordinary has briefly become a photograph.
His next curiosity is medium format, another step into a process that naturally demands even more patience and intention.
The useful accident
Miguel describes some of the photographs he values most as accidents—not accidents in the sense of careless mistakes, but moments that could not have been fully planned. Someone happened to look in a certain direction. Two people briefly aligned. A gesture appeared and disappeared.
The photographer’s role is to notice.
For Miguel, that is becoming the central lesson of analogue photography: slow down enough to be aware of the world around you. The photograph begins before the shutter. It begins with attention.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about photographers, their memories, working methods and the lives behind the images.
