Girl, film’s so confusing
Lilly explores the recent comeback of point-and-shoot cameras. Spoiler: Gen Z calls them "digi cams" now.
In a dimly lit bar, I show my friend a candid photo of Mike and I that rocked my confidence when I saw it. I’m squinting. My face is scrunched into the polite smile I wear at gatherings with people I want to like me and children I don’t know how to speak to, my one eyebrow that always sits higher than the other is exaggerated. My shirt is riding up much higher than I thought it was. My round face looks too wide. Seeing it felt like stumbling into a bar bathroom on a good night and finding lettuce in my teeth, mascara melting down the side of my face.
“No, you don’t look like that,” she says without hesitation. “I would tell you if you did.” I believe her — one, because she promised she’d tell me one way or another and, two, because I want her to be right.
…
A week earlier, I was enjoying time in Maine with family, where the aforementioned Bad Photo was taken. A few days into the trip, I got an email from the print shop I use to develop photos. There had been a malfunction with one of their machines, and two out of three rolls I sent them had been destroyed in the process. Of the destroyed rolls, one contained the first photos I had ever shot on my film camera, mostly portraits of my cat, and the other was from my bachelorette party. Though I had easily procrastinated sending them in for almost a year, being unable to see the photos was now devastating. Especially since in the photos I did get back — the ones from the morning of my wedding day — I looked so good. My smile was big but relaxed, my skin was glowing from the flash. It’s what I had hoped I would look like the morning of my wedding. I wanted more.
It didn’t matter that I had over a thousand photos in a shared iPhone album from my bachelorette party and wedding day that my bridesmaids had carefully put together. Now I had to wonder about Schrödinger’s film rolls forever. What if they contained the best photos of me ever taken?
…
If you think you look better in film photos than photos taken on your phone, you’re not alone. Smartphone cameras, even the really advanced ones, distort your face and body. Tasked with converting a three-dimensional figure into a two-dimensional image, all cameras get it wrong, to different degrees.
We tend to stand closer to our phone cameras — especially when using the front camera — so the distortion is further exaggerated. Our noses grow and our heads shrink in selfies, like we’re being looked at through a fisheye. Newer iPhones adjust the lighting of our photos and smooth our skin automatically. As a result, we adjust how we stand and pose and hold our eyebrows to compensate for the distortion, without even realizing. The photos can feel uncanny.
Disposable cameras and point-and-shoots, early aughts staples that have been skyrocketing in sales in recent years, are being billed as an antidote. The cameras encourage us to stand a little further back, removing some of the distortion. When used correctly, the flash darkens the background and lights up the subject, adding a moody and dramatic feeling. And, as my fellow 2010s-era VSCO girls know, the subtle grain that coats film photos softens and slightly blurs away blemishes.
Point-and-shoots, renamed “digi cams” by Gen Z, are currently selling out for months at a time. If you ask why, you may hear talk of the desire to unplug from phones, take photos with more intention, and capture memories more authentically. It’s the same desire that drives vinyl and flip phone sales. Unfortunately, for a generation raised with smartphones, I don’t know if that’s as easy as changing cameras.
Digi cams offer aesthetic similarities to disposable cameras, but with technological training wheels. With film cameras, whether the photographer forgot to turn the flash on, put a finger in front of the lens, or there was an issue during development, there’s a chance that the photos you’re so desperate for were never more than big black rectangles that were expensive to obtain. With digi cams, you can retake a failed photo, use automated settings to get the lighting right, and upload pictures to your computer or phone without too much delay (making it easier to just send me the fucking photos!). And save for a damaged memory card, your photos are safe — with as many opportunities to upload, reupload, edit, and re-edit as you need. They let us give into these urges that disposables deny.
…
I don’t remember exactly when I started using photos of myself as a means of collecting proof that I looked like what I wanted to look like — but the timeline is wrapped up in the advent of Photo Booth, Facebook, iPhones, Instagram, and Snapchat like DNA.
I’ve always liked taking pictures, even before I had a computer to upload them to or an account to post them on. When I was a kid, my parents gave me a hand-me-down point-and-shoot that was big and bulky, about the size of my forearm. I took it on all our trips, diligently reapplying the scotch tape I used to keep the battery and memory card compartments shut. I often just scrolled through my photos of lunches, close-ups of my grandma, and seagulls on the camera’s tiny screen. As a teen, I graduated to an entry-level DSLR and took a few classes, ultimately ending up with a love of landscape photography and a couple-months-long stint in photojournalism after college.
Being in photos, however, is something that I’ve had a more love-hate relationship with. Even before puberty came on and I really started to feel really self conscious, I made silly faces in an attempt to “ruin” family photos. It was easier to scowl or stick my tongue out or cross my eyes than to face the fear that I may look earnestly ugly otherwise.
The first time I remember really having fun taking photos of myself was with my two best friends at a sleepover. Crowded around my chunky white Mac laptop, we spent at least two or three hours making funny faces into the built-in camera on Photo Booth, laughing at filters that dragged our heads into giant rectangles, washed us out in sepia tone like a tea-soaked history project, or quadrupled us into colored squares like we were Marilyn Monroe. We didn’t delete any of them; all made their way to an album called something along the lines of “Lilly’s 12th birthday” on my newly minted Facebook account. Many were probably never seen by anyone besides us, lost in a sea of similar digital algae.
Later photoshoots had more definitive end goals. Instagram put single photos on display with highly visible like counts that encouraged you to put your best face forward. Snapchat did put an emphasis on face-distorting filters, but while they were billed as silly (placing dog ears or a pigeon on your head), many of them also made your eyes bigger, slimmed your face, and shrunk your nose — with laughably obvious dysphoria-causing effects. If you weren’t a teenager in the 2010s, then you will never understand why I felt my hottest with the dog filter on and I envy you for that. Both apps, plus the improvement of the iPhone camera, were a few of the tech advances that encouraged taking as many photos of ourselves as possible — ostensibly for posterity and sharing for friends, but come on, we all know that’s not what we were using it for.
Somehow, photos became proof, not of the fun I had, but of how good I looked while I was having it. The idea that taking photos was a way of creating a lifelong memory became a conveniently less shallow excuse to get more evidence that I looked the way I wanted to — and iPhone cameras let me and my friends try as many times as I needed to. In 100 rapid-fire photos in front of a pretty background, surely there was one where I held my chin up and shoulders back and smiled big without showing too much of my gums. Looking through the results could be completely reality-shaking or exhilarating, making or breaking how I felt at whatever event I was supposedly commemorating. If all I was looking for was a memory, then why did I check the photos to try to “fix” how the memory would look in real time?
…
For better or worse, I deleted the Bad Photo. I’m sure that if I look through my camera roll closely, zooming in and out of my face and body like I’ve been shamefully conditioned to do with images of myself, more will pop up in its place. I can always find something that looks worse than another photo I remember seeing, another feature in a photo someone else loves that’s somehow wrong or not me. The temptation to chop the head off the hydra is strong. It’s a bad habit that the cameras from my childhood can help me work on, if I let them.
With thousands of pictures of ourselves at our disposal, and the ability to take thousands more within minutes, we have too many options. The only answer I can see is stupidly simple, but hard to practice: Limit the data or, at the very least, don’t look at the pictures until you get home.
Mama let’s research
Find further reading and resources on this week’s topic below!
“Falling in love again with disposable cameras” by Jessica M. Goldstein - The Washington Post — Here’s a quick primer on Gen Z’s obsession with disposable cameras!
“Why Gen Z is obsessed with point-and-shoot cameras” by Tanya Chen - Fast Company — … and a companion piece on the rise of point-and-shoots to go with it!
“No, you don’t really look like that” by Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic — If you’re curious to know more about why and how iPhone pictures distort our image, here’s a great piece that goes more in depth than I did.
“I Regret What’s In My Camera Roll” by — This piece looks at how one writer’s camera roll has changed throughout the years — from mostly fun, imperfect photos of friends to solely Instagram-worthy aesthetic shots of surroundings. — LM
Hunter-gatherer corner
What we’ve read and DMed each other about lately — our internet bounty is below!
“There is No Moral Imperative to Be Miserable” by James Greig - Mental Hellth — This essay was posted in
’s newsletter in 2022, but it’s relevant as ever. It can be so easy to over-intellectualize your mental health, and convince yourself there’s nothing you can do to feel better when the state of the world is so dire. This is a really leveled (and dare I say, a realistically hopeful?) take that I’ve already shared with about 10 people this week. — LM“How ‘The Real World’ Created Modern Reality TV” by Emily Nussbaum - The New Yorker — One of the things I like to do in this newsletter is spend more time being the reality TV historian that I am, so I really enjoyed this look back into season 1 of The Real World by Nussbaum, whose TV coverage I’ve enjoyed for a long time. It made me even more excited for her forthcoming book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, which I will definitely be pre-ordering. — LM
“A New Book Tackles The Splendor And Squalor Of Reality TV” by Kyndall Cunningham - Vox — Jinx! Had to link the Vox review too, which is much briefer for those of you with lacking attention spans. — MF
“I Have a Terrible Memory. Am I Better Off That Way?” by Katy Schneider - The Cut — Topical! As a Forgetter who hates being one (literally do not ask me what I wore yesterday, ate this morning, said twenty minutes ago, etc.) , this is why my camera roll has over 20,000 photos. — MF
Why Not?
Why Not? is our biweekly list of recommendations. Think recipes, gift guides, podcasts, clothes, and anything we consider to be generally chic. Have a suggestion? Let us know!
Desperate Housewives — I have never related to a tweet more. Desperate Housewives is one of the most addicting shows I’ve ever watched. It’s completely taken over my life, and I am inviting that reality in with open arms. I broke my foot a little over a week ago so I’ve been couch-bound since then, and one thought that has helped me get over the general distress of sitting down for 3-4 weeks of my summer is “at least I can watch more Desperate Housewives.” It’s that serious. — LM
@shit.u.should.buy — An old coworker recommended this Instagram account, which compiles a daily cross section of sales on clothing, beauty, and accessories daily. Her stories catalog picks from The RealReal and Vestaire, as well as major retailers. I just picked up a pair of actually cute Aerosoles sandals for walking in the city without destroying my feet. I would’ve never found this pair without this account! —MF
If you liked this issue, snap a photo! Tell us your thoughts in the comments or on Instagram (@lilly_milman | @melindafakuade), and link it when you’re sending your friend the fucking photos!
i don't FEEL my hottest with the dog filter. i'm fairly certain that I AM my hottest with the dog filter. still. wait.. is that bad?! ;)