WHYY19%
Philadelphia’s Photo Lounge shows what summer looked like before Instagram 17%
By Peter Crimmins15%
8/8/2026, 3:00:36 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Availability Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 15.5% saturation with 170 hits. Analysis detected 1,317 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,098 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25.1% and a BS Rank of 17% (25,496 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.40% of the article peer group.
“That Summer Feeling,” at Photo Lounge on 17th Street in Philadelphia’s Center City, showcases more than 80 large-scale prints of summer family vacations of yore, submitted by staff and longtime customers.
The exhibition is a window into what vacation snapshots looked like before Instagram, such as Wendy Goldberg’s family photo on the beach from 1976, when Goldberg was 7 years old and her family had just bought a vacation condo in Ventnor, New Jersey.
“The minute school ended, my mom would pack us up and the next day we’d come down for the entire summer,” Goldberg recalled.
“It was probably on a weekend when my father came and joined us.”
The photo is notable for her father’s feet.
Goldberg said this picture is one of the few informal images of her entire family.
“It’s just so funny and perfect because even though we’re kind of posing, not everybody is trying to smile or sit up perfectly,” Goldberg said.
“We’re just totally relaxed having a typical day at the beach.”
In the 50 years since that photo was taken, the sun, sand and saltwater of summers down the shore have not changed, but photography has.
Photo Lounge put out a call in May for photos taken before 2010, the year Instagram launched and when more people began taking photos intended for social media.
“There’s a slowness that is more reminiscent of the days of film when we took a single picture, not 250 pictures,” said Ravid Butz, 56, the owner of Photo Lounge.
“It really is a singular picture.
It’s the only one they took that hour, maybe the only one they took that day.”
Social media platforms have changed travel.
A survey by the travel website Hotelagio shows that 75% of travelers use social media to decide where to go, and 40% of travelers aged 30-40 choose vacation destinations based on how “Instagrammable” they are.
Vacationers driven by social media are shaped by influencers who stand to make a lot of money from it.
A well-placed influencer could earn a five- and six-digit return on a carefully curated post.
So much is at stake that as hotels, airlines and regional tourism companies use avatars generated by artificial intelligence to promote travel, real-life influencers have cried foul, according to The New York Times.
A return to analog photography
Emily Girgis, the gallery and marketing director at Photo Lounge, said her experience on social media is shifting away from performative glamour.
“I see friends posting moments that are not spectacular moments but are moments that I find beautiful and interesting and small,” Girgis, 27, said.
“Whereas when Instagram was first created it was the glamour shot.”
Photo Lounge has been a film-processing business in Philadelphia for almost 30 years.
The business has weathered the ubiquity of the camera phone by nurturing a community of photographers working in chemical and digital media.
Customers can become dues-paying members to get perks like photography outings, scrapbooking workshops and high-quality prints.
Butz said about 1,000 people have opted to pay monthly or annual fees to be part of Photo Lounge’s community.
Popular interest in film photography has risen dramatically over the last several years, much like other forms of analog media, such as vinyl records and books.
Hannah Feinberg, 24, is an amateur photographer who has toggled between film and digital cameras for years.
She said the nature of film photography pushes her to take fewer pictures, and to take them more deliberately.
“Smartphones are so good at this point, digital cameras are much more accessible, but every time I shoot digital the pictures just don’t feel as special,” she said.
“It’s a very intentional, mindful practice of shooting something and saying, ‘This is going to be the one photo that I take in this moment.’”
Feeling nostalgic for something you never experienced
Feinberg submitted three family photos to “That Summer Feeling” taken in the 1930s and 40s, some of the oldest images in the exhibition.
They include a 1931 shot of her great-grandparents as newlyweds on a Ventnor beach where her great-grandmother is riding on her great-grandfather’s shoulders.
“It’s framed in every house that I’ve been in in my family,” Feinberg said.
“It was really cool to see it printed in Photo Lounge and on the wall there because I grew up seeing it all the time.”
Many people submitted photos to “That Summer Feeling” that were taken before they were alive.
Morgan Ryan submitted a photo taken by her mother in the summer of 1981, when she was a teenager.
A group of Philly teens, including Ryan’s mother and uncle and their friends, took a road trip to Stone Harbor, New Jersey, but got three flat tires on the way.
The 84-mile car trip took six hours.
Stranded on the side of the road, Ryan’s uncle, shirtless in cutoff jeans, held up a sign reading “Send Help.”
According to family lore, a driver pulled over, but instead of offering help, they sold the teens “the worst weed.”
The Jersey Shore plays a starring role in “That Summer Feeling,” supported by an international cast of bucolic scenes from places like Vietnam, Ukraine, Lithuania and Mexico.
An image from Dhërmi, Albania, in 2005, shows a young boy sitting in an inflated pool on a rocky beach being cautiously investigated by a puppy.
“I love this photo because this was likely the first time my brother interacted with a dog,” wrote Emi Strati, who submitted the image.
Another photo shows a scene in the New Jersey Pine Barrens circa the 1970s, where a young red-haired woman, who appears annoyed, scoops food from a camp stove pot onto a paper plate.
Behind her, a platinum blonde smokes a cigarette.
The photo was submitted by Kenny Marshall, who was not there but feels like he was.
“According to my grandma, they were having a summer barbeque/gathering,” Marshall wrote.
“I have always admired this picture because it perfectly encapsulates how family-filled summers feel to me.”
There is a word for that feeling: anemoia, or feeling nostalgic for something you never experienced.
“It’s these small little moments that have so much deeper meaning behind them,” Girgis said.
“What is a cute and joyful photograph has layers of: ‘My family’s story unraveled in this image because this is where my parents met,’ or ‘This is a childhood vacation spot that carries so much weight.’
It became so much bigger than we originally expected.”
“That Summer Feeling” will be on view inside the Photo Lounge store until the end of August.
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100%flagged-word coverageThe New York Times
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