In a digital world, Pittsburgh is an analog paradise

Whether it’s writing in a journal, leafing through pictures and books, or cueing up a record from your favorite artist, there is something undeniably rewarding about physical media. Our desire for tangibility is, after all, innately human. We crave things that are tactile, as we are creatures who need to touch and taste and smell. Because we now live in a world where physical media and their accompanying devices have been largely refashioned into code and pixels for our ubiquitous screens, it’s hardly surprising that there’s been a growing backlash driven by people who love, praise, or simply appreciate physical media in all their nondigital, analog forms.

Despite all odds and most predictions, print copies of books are still selling in the U.S., and the number of independent bookstores has dramatically increased by 70% since 2020. Self-published zines and zine fairs continue to be popular with niche audiences. Film photography continues to attract new fans, and one of the industry’s flagship companies, Kodak, is still holding on after filing bankruptcy in 2012. And, perhaps most notably, vinyl records have been making an unexpected comeback since 2006 and recently outsold CDs for the first time since 1987. Cassettes even somehow broke containment from underground music scenes and reached mass markets via new releases from Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift.

There’s plenty of speculation about what’s driving the relatively small but burgeoning popularity of analog media. Many see it as a response to our current technological malaise that’s been variously diagnosed as “Zoom fatigue,” “social media fatigue,” and “online fatigue.” One might even describe it as the “digital blues” or “techno-bummerism” (to crib a phrase from a prominent cone-headed, proto-fascist Silicon Valley venture capitalist). Personally, I like the old-timey ring of digital neurasthenia to describe the modern-day techno-melancholy that our 19th-century brethren once termed “Americanitis.”

Whatever you call it, there’s a cross-section of the population who are psychologically and spiritually disenchanted with how our everyday lives have been colonized by billionaire tech bros and their digital creations. And there are few things that have been as radically mutated by the digital revolution as our individual and collective relationships to analog media, particularly music and photography. Regardless of whether one views such transformations as liberatory or destructive, many people — especially those amongst Gen Z — are rethinking the value of ‘old’ media technologies and formats that we use to image the present and listen to the past.

Vince Bomba has seen these trends ebb and flow since he first opened Galaxie Electronics over 16 years ago. The self-professed “Turntable Doctor” is one of the few people in the city who fixes record players, and he excels at the craft he honed for decades prior to opening his Squirrel Hill business. Amongst the vinyl DJs I know in Pittsburgh, Vince is well-regarded and is variously described as a “lifesaver,” a “local institution,” and “the only game in town,” as some of them put it. Anyone who’s owned a record player knows they eventually need to be fixed, and there’s a good chance that, if you’ve ever had a turntable or vintage stereo equipment repaired in Pittsburgh, Vince is the one who did it. 

Vinyl sales are nothing like the heyday of the record industry in the 1970s, where it was common to sell 300 million records per year, but a significant amount of the albums now sold in the U.S. are on vinyl, including 43 million units in 2024. Technicians like Vince play an outsized role in keeping those records spinning, which he’s been doing for over 40 years, first as a hobby and eventually as a side gig for Jerry’s Records in the 1990s. When Mellon Bank was sold in the mid-2000s and laid off all its data center technicians, Vince’s 26-year career with the company ended, and he soon took over the space adjacent to Jerry’s Records left vacant by Heads Together.

Vince says that “the peak has peaked” for interest in analog stereo equipment, based on what he’s seen, though turntable repairs still constitute most of his business due to the unlikely return of vinyl. 

“As long as they keep pressing it, I think people will keep buying it,” he tells me as I look at some vintage audio collectibles that he’s pulled for me to peruse on the store’s glass displays. I get my first peek at one of the original cassettes that RCA first produced in the late 1950s, along with colorful 2-track and 4-track tape cartridges that were the predecessors to the once-popular 8-track cassettes I remember seeing in cars as a kid. While we’re chatting, a woman pops out from the back room behind the workstation, whom Vince introduces as his wife and partner Sue.

“She does all the important stuff,” he says, referring to ordering parts, waiting on customers, and handling all the business’s paperwork. “I just fix things,” Vince chuckles.

The staying power of vinyl is a case study in how the dominant narratives we hear about technology — especially the notion that newer is better — aren’t always true. The same can be said of analog stereo equipment, including the older turntables that cycle in and out of Galaxie. Because just as there are tradeoffs to the accessibility of streaming music (such as paying subscription fees to heartless platforms whose CEOs seemingly hate musicians), there are things we also sacrifice through our reliance on digital devices, namely the ability to repair them or even use them for more than a handful of years. This is a problem that technicians like Vince know all too well. 

“You can’t repair the new stuff. You can’t get schematics, you can’t get parts, and you can’t get information from the companies,” he says. “I can still get parts for a 25- or 50-year-old Technics turntable, but I can’t get them for one that was made last week.”

If repair work plays an unsung role in the vinyl revival, it plays a Herculean role in the revival of film photography, where new film cameras weren’t even made for most of the past two decades, and big corporations like Nikon don’t even sell parts for film cameras anymore. Bruce Klein, the owner of Bernie’s Photo Center on E. Ohio Street, has basements filled with old camera parts from trade-ins, and he’s constantly servicing old film cameras that people buy online or dig out of the family attic. And he’s been a busy man in recent years. 

“There’s a resurgence in analog photography like the resurgence with vinyl records,” Bruce tells me. “It’s increasing at hundreds of a percent. I mean, look at all my film,” he says while pointing to neatly arranged stacks of colorful boxes behind the counter of his merchandise-packed store. 

Bruce is certainly well suited to gauge the public’s interest in film photography. His father Bernie opened Bernie’s Photo Center 68 years ago, and he grew up hanging around the shop day in and day out. He was already working at the store when his father passed, and he decided to keep the place going, which he has for the past 45 years.

“Film photography is so popular now that Kodak just came out with two new films (Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200). And because it’s part of this resurgence, they even made some of their old film boxes look retro,” he notes with a grin. “That box was probably the design they had 40 years ago, and they brought it back.”

Flooding the market with “retro” products that scratch Americans’ nostalgic itch for the past, whether real or romanticized, isn’t anything new. Nor is the cynicism that’s so easy to cultivate in response to the unspoken, 20-year arms race between corporate marketers and waves of vintage-adoring hipsters, whose quest for meaning and authenticity often translates into fetishizing ever more obscure technologies. 

But there seems to be something much more substantial going on here with the “resurgence” that Bruce mentions, particularly since the bulk of his customers are incapable of feeling nostalgia for something they never experienced before.

“As a rule, my demographics are 18-to-30 for analog right now,” he tells me. “I mean, over 30, there’s still a few shooters, but those people already grew up on film, and they knew what film was all about and then went to digital. But the 18- to 30-year-olds grew up on a cell phone. They never had film before. So, film is new.”

In an age where seemingly everything is either accessible or available for the right price, it’s hard to underestimate how much genuine meaning and joy people can derive from a new experience such as first learning to use a film camera or dropping the needle on a vinyl record for the first time. Novelty can be powerful unto itself, but the more significant thing seems to be what young people, especially, are gleaning from the experience. They’re realizing firsthand how using these old and presumably outdated technologies can reorient and reshape their engagement with media, including the ways they listen and see, as well as what they learn to enjoy and appreciate about it. Vinyl enthusiasts, for example, will commonly preach the gospel of how much fuller and richer records sound in comparison to streaming music, and also how listening to records makes you a more attentive listener — since you’re usually sitting with the music, getting up to flip sides of the disc, and using your hands to select records and play specific songs.

Vince highlights this connection in our conversation: “There’s a dimension there that’s on the analog device that’s not on digital. By the time they compress and digitize the music, it’s flat. It doesn’t have that same dimension. It’s cleaner — there’s no cracks, no pops, and it’s easier to maneuver across different songs — but the sound is not the same. If you want background music, the digital is fine. But if you want to sit in your living room with a glass of wine, you need to put a record on and just experience it, you know. It’s just a whole different sound.”

In the same way that listening to records can foster a different relationship to music and sound, experimenting with analog cameras introduces people to new visual palettes that expand their approach to producing images. But perhaps most importantly, according to Bruce, it teaches them about photography itself.

“With a film camera, you only got 36 shots,” he says. “That means you have to make sure that everything’s in focus, the meter’s right, that the composition is exact, and then you press the button. It slows you down. Film makes you a better photographer because you have to learn photography.”

In discussing the merits of analog cameras and film photography with Bruce, one gets the sense that these technologies can really reshape the tastes and expectations we’ve all developed through our reliance on smartphone cameras. He seems particularly taken with how many budding photographers come to appreciate time in a different way through film.    

“To be honest with you, they like the anticipation of waiting to get the photos back instead of it being an instant thing,” Bruce says. The wait he’s describing is the roughly 2-week period from when photographers drop off their film to Bernie’s to when they get their prints back from the Kodak facility where they’re processed. 

“It’s really something when you wait. You get a tangible thing, you get actual prints, and now you can pass them around to people, your friends, or you hold on to them. So analog, in a sense, is actually preserving history.”

Vince and Bruce play their own significant roles in preserving history and facilitating community through their work, and they do so more for their customers’ joy than for the money that changes hands. At the counter in Bernie’s Photo Center, I realize that, beyond their similarities as local store owners and expert technicians, these two men are actually in the exact same line of work: the memory industry. I put this to Bruce before I depart, and he replies with another smile.

“I am in the memory industry. More so than you think.”