People assume the film thing is an aesthetic. The grain, the halation, the little light leaks that make everything look like a memory. That is all pleasant, but it is not why.
Here is why. On my first big editorial, years ago, the photographer shot large format and everything took forever. Eleven minutes between frames, sometimes more. The other new girl on the call fidgeted through every pause and her frames show it. I had spent the summer printing in a borrowed bathroom and I knew what those eleven minutes were for, so I held the pose and held the feeling under it, and my frames ran in the magazine. Understanding the process bought me patience, and patience photographs well.
Since then it has become a discipline. I know what a stop of light does because I have paid for the difference in ruined paper. I know why the photographer wants the window at my back at four in the afternoon, and I am already there before they ask. Modelling is mostly translation, turning someone's technical intentions into something that looks like a feeling, and it helps enormously to speak the source language.
So no, not nostalgia. Homework. The most beautiful homework there is, done on Sundays, under a red light, in a room that smells of fixer and Gia's terrible coffee.