Michael Myerz, 29, an experimental hip-hop artist from Atlanta, who has a modest collection of VHS tapes, finds the medium inspiring. Part of what Myerz seeks in his work, he said, is to replicate the sounds of “some strange and obscure VHS film that I would have seen at my friend’s house, late at night, after his parents slept.” He described his work as “mid-lo-fi”. “The quality looks raw, but hot and full of flavor,” he said of VHS.
For collectors like April Bleakney, 35, owner and artist of Ape Made, a Cleveland fine arts and screen printing company, nostalgia plays a significant role in collecting. Ms. Bleakney, who has between 2,400 and 2,500 VHS tapes, sees them as a path that connects her with the past. She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a vast collection.
Bleakney’s VHS tapes are “a great nostalgia,” she said, for a child of the 1980s. ”, She said, looks“ very natural ”.
“I think people miss the aura of the VHS era,” said Thomas Allen Harris, 58, creator of the television series “Family Pictures USA” and a senior lecturer in African American studies and film and media studies at Yale University. “Many cultural contact points are rooted there,” said Harris of the 1980s. It was, he believes, “a time when, in a way, Americans knew who we were.”
The VHS tape, of course, had a useful life. Developed in Japan in 1976, brought to the United States in 1977 and essentially discontinued in 2006 when films stopped being converted to tape, this medium brought all types of entertainment home.
Connoisseurs of cinema could not only walk through the halls of video stores on Friday nights, but also compose home movies, from the artistic to the futile. In an era that preceded DVR technology, they could record television episodes with the recording function of the now defunct VCR.