Grant Bayley works in a world built almost entirely from digital systems. That is exactly why analogue photography became important to him.
He traces the shift partly to 2019, when a company he was working for went bankrupt and digital systems simply disappeared as services stopped. The experience sharpened a thought that had already been forming: cloud storage, software and online services can feel permanent until suddenly they are not. Family photographs, by contrast, had already survived decades.
That contrast became personal when he found a medium-format Voigtländer Bessa at his father’s house in Australia. The camera had belonged to his grandfather and dated from the late 1930s. It still worked.
“The iPhone’s temporary but your family’s memories shouldn’t be.”
A camera returns to the family
The inherited Bessa connected Bayley to family history in a physical way. He had originally been searching for a Ricoh point-and-shoot used on a 1985 family trip to Europe. Instead he found a much older object, learned its story, and put it back into use.
From there, photography became a conscious attempt to avoid gaps in the family archive. His family has moved across countries — from Australia to Switzerland and the United States to Switzerland — and he wants the photographs made now to remain understandable to future generations.
Being there and preserving it
Bayley photographs work trips, travel, family and the ordinary moments that happen around them. He tries to work quickly enough that taking a photograph does not replace participating in the experience. Cameras such as the Fujica GL690 and Nikon F5 help because they can be prepared in advance and used decisively.
Available light is especially important to him. A flash announces the camera and changes people’s behaviour. He prefers the moment before performance begins.
That mattered when photographing his daughter singing on stage. The images are private, but their meaning is central to the story: the singing mattered to her, so preserving that period mattered to him.
Film stocks as memory
Bayley chooses film stocks deliberately, not only for technical reasons but for atmosphere. Tungsten cinema stocks can feel raw and grungy; halation becomes part of the image. Fuji Pro 400H and Provia 100F occupy a different emotional space for him, especially when the photograph itself becomes visible on a transparency.
He is equally interested in cameras that make photography harder: old folders, spy cameras, unusual formats and lenses with strong character. Part of the pleasure is finding out what each machine allows and what kind of image it produces.
“The real memories in my life come from the physical, tangible and real things we did.”
Imperfection without simulation
Bayley values imperfection when it feels inseparable from the event of making the photograph: a small light leak on cut-down cinema film, an unpredictable edge effect, something no firmware engineer intentionally designed. But imperfection stops being useful when it destroys the essential character of the image.
The archive he is building is therefore not an argument against technology. It is a conscious counterweight to a professional life built around systems that are designed to change. The cameras, negatives and transparencies are slower and less convenient, but they give his family something physical to inherit — and, ideally, something they can keep using themselves.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
