digital magic

halloween 2020 shot on a y2k camera

Film cameras, as we all know, are very cool. But, they can be pretty clunky, which means they’re not ideal for the nights you want to recreate the cobra snake archive. You have to be pretty nimble if you want to capture slinky celebs with razor haircuts wearing hand-me-down pants absolutely losing themselves in some dingy club bathroom. They simply move too fast. Bc of the drugs. It’s helpful, then, to have an extremely portable digital camera.

People chuckle when I whip out my little 2005 canon camera I bought for $5 from the thrift store. “My mom had one of those! I haven’t seen that since middle school!”

I always think: tomorrow, when I email you a massive photo album, where you and I both look dope as hell, Then You Will Realize.

After all, these little cameras carried all of Myspace* on their backs with Cool Pix.

What I think is remarkable about the 2005 Digital Camera is that it romances the mundane. The pictures I’m about to share with you are from a totally typical little halloween hang in 2020**. We mostly read tarot cards, tried to feel the presence of ghosts, had a few white claws, and took pics. But the digital veneer on the photos themselves makes it seem like this night was some wild afterparty. At least in my opinion, that’s kinda magical.

(and I mean, it was fun, but it was also just a chill hang)

There’s something so dramatic about the quality of this camera’s flash, too. It’s identifiable in photos of teenage Paris Hilton: that close range, cold flash that illuminates every ounce of concealer. In my mind that look will always be associated with party girl glamour. Here she goes, running from Limo to Club to Sidewalk to Taxi to Club, her makeup disintegrating as the night progresses.

It’s just like Brian Eno said:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

-Brian Eno

*Given the state of twitter, can we bring back Myspace? I was too young to experience its heyday

**Can you tell what my costume is? I’m supposed to be the girl on the cover of Live Through This by Hole.