“I think that people are nostalgic for the aura of the VHS era,” said Thomas Allen Harris, 58, a creator of the television series “Family Pictures USA” and a senior lecturer in African-American studies and film and media studies at Yale University. “I think we were the last to grow up without the internet, cellphones or social media,” and clinging to the “old analog ways,” she said, feels “very natural.” Bleakney’s VHS tapes are “huge nostalgia,” she said, for a child of the 1980s. She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a vast collection.
Bleakney, who has between 2,400 to 2,500 VHS tapes, views them as a byway connecting her with the past.
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Myerz seeks in his work, he said, is to replicate the sounds from “some weird, obscure movie on VHS I would have seen at my friend’s house, late at night, after his parents were asleep.” He described his work as “mid-lo-fi.” “The quality feels raw but warm and full of flavor,” he said of VHS.įor collectors like April Bleakney, 35, the owner and artist of Ape Made, a fine art and screen-printing company in Cleveland, nostalgia plays a significant role in collecting. Michael Myerz, 29, an experimental hip-hop artist in Atlanta, who has a modest collection of VHS tapes, finds the medium inspirational. “It was a way for everyone to capture something and then put it out there.” “Anything that you can think of is on VHS tape, because, you’ve got to think, it was a revolutionary piece of the media,” said Josh Schafer, 35, of Raleigh, N.C., a founder and the editor in chief of Lunchmeat Magazine and, which are dedicated to the appreciation and preservation of VHS.
In that sense, the VHS tape offers something the current market cannot: a vast library of moving images that are unavailable anywhere else. Booth said, was “promised as a giant video store on the internet, where a customer was only one click away from the exact film they were looking for.”īut the reality, he said, is that new releases are prohibitively expensive, content is “fractured” between subscription services, and movies operate in cycles, often disappearing before people have the chance to watch them. “The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,” said Matthew Booth, 47, the owner of Videodrome in Atlanta, which sells VHS tapes in addition to its Blu-ray and DVD rental business.
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