You Can’t Get it

Photographic film for vegetarians or vegans isn’t something you’ll find for sale.

Plant-based photographers wishing to use film must either willingly, or ignorantly, use byproducts of slaughterhouses; boiled-down: skin, bone, ligaments.

Why doesn’t vegan camera film exist?

Because film technology relies on the properties of gelatine, which a single alternative doesn’t offer.

Doesn’t Exist, Or Can’t Exist?

It’s a bit like substituting a chicken egg in a recipe, a complex component which requires multiple ingredients to replace all of its combined qualities.

You can select a single alternative based on one needed function (banana as binder & thickener, for example) but no single vegan ingredient can quite (yet) replace the unique qualities of an egg.

In many recipes, an ingredient you don’t want to use, can just be dropped from the recipe; without using an alternative, but the gelatine in photographic film is essential to the way in which that piece of film works.

The Alternative Is… Digital?

Yep, with all the same complicated ethical issues of how and where materials are sourced to build batteries, computer chips, and factories full of slave labour; digital is as close to vegan as possible in the year 2021.

Even the controversial, yet undeniably dedicated organization, PETA, admits to knowingly using gelatine-film before digital cameras were invented, in order to document abuse and collect evidence, taking the lesser evil of using animal products to enact direct change.

It seems the only way to function as a human being is to make some uncomfortable decisions while doing our best to be better in ways accessible to us.

Buy secondhand, source your energy from green sources, maintain equipment so it will last, and keep up to date with alternative methods of fixing images such as USING LEAVES?