Tereza Vondrackova grew up with analogue photography before she thought of it as analogue. A family point-and-shoot appeared on holidays and ordinary occasions, making photographs simply because something felt worth keeping.
Years later, around the age of thirty, she found herself returning to that childhood habit. The technology was familiar, but the meaning had changed. Film became a deliberate way of staying close to the present while creating something for the future.
Making memories without leaving the moment
For Vondrackova, photography is fundamentally connected to memory. She is drawn to small things that feel worth carrying forward: light moving across a building, people she loves, an accidental gesture, a situation that may never repeat in quite the same way.
Analogue photography strengthens that feeling because there is no immediate image to check. The moment is allowed to continue. The photograph exists, but it does not instantly interrupt the experience that produced it.
Wedding as a photographic home
Berlin-Wedding has become part of that relationship. Vondrackova feels attached to the Malplaquet-Kiez and to the community around it, including the area surrounding Berlin Photo Studio.
Photographing a neighbourhood one actually lives in is different from photographing a destination. The streets are not novel, so attention has to work harder. Familiar places become meaningful through repetition: the route you walk often enough to stop noticing, then suddenly see differently because the light changes or a person enters the scene.
Why holidays fit film
Travel is another natural setting for Vondrackova’s film practice. Holidays already create a separation from everyday routine, and analogue photography extends that separation. She can photograph without immediately processing the experience through a screen.
The delayed result gives travel photographs a second moment of discovery after returning home. The roll becomes a container for experiences that are already beginning to turn into memory.
Rome, light and humans being humans
On a recent trip to Rome, Vondrackova found herself watching light fall across architecture and noticing what she describes simply as “humans being humans.” These ordinary interactions are increasingly important to her.
She wants more spontaneity in future photographs: people occupied with their lives, objects in motion and scenes whose energy does not depend on being arranged for the camera.
A Watermelon roll changes the palette
Until recently, much of Vondrackova’s film experience had been with familiar Kodak stocks. Trying Berlin Photo Studio’s Watermelon film introduced another variable: colour that could behave less predictably and move further away from the literal scene.
That unpredictability made her more curious about colour as an independent part of the photograph. Instead of asking only whether the film reproduced what she saw, she could ask what the altered palette added to the memory.
The intimacy of not seeing immediately
There is a quiet intimacy in taking out a film camera around people you care about. The action acknowledges that the moment matters, but the absence of instant review keeps it from becoming a performance about the photograph itself.
Vondrackova’s return to analogue photography is therefore less a return to an old technology than to an old relationship with time. The camera creates an object for later while allowing the present to remain intact.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
