Money Shots #1
A continuing project featuring one shot from each roll of film that I've developed and scanned onto this computer.
Film photography will be the death of me. It is my one costly hobby outside of going to the movies. I’ve used plenty of junky point-and-shoot cameras over the years, ran through the odd disposable, and struggled with a fully manual camera here and there. I used to mock people who put “film” filters over their instagram photos, but then realized that we’ve looked through the lenses of our phones so much that it’s become part of how we see the world. Adjusting for the auto ISO settings on the iPhone camera, bracing one’s self before switching to the front-facing, squinting to see something an Android user sent you, these modes of seeing have been so standardized that aspiring photo posters (note: not photographers) have looked to secondary units to capture moments and people and landscapes in a way that takes on a wholly different visual strategy and texture than the camera they use to take pictures of their leaking faucets to send to their landlords.
As someone who only follows a couple hundred people that I know and zero influencers on Instagram, broad online image trends tend to take a while to reach me. My discover page is just now showing me videos of millennial women showing off their record collections, something that would have been more useful to me circa 2019. That being said, I did take note of the point-and-shoot trend a few years back, to the point where the #35mm hashtag became something of a running joke in irony twitter circles. Then, the Coolpix Era began, which I was exposed to at a Silverlake zine release party. The awful, overexposed, greasy, flash-banged out digital sheen of these Bush→Obama I Era consumer grade cameras brought about a new sense of nostalgia, often tied in online hipster circles to the indie sleaze movement, which failed in its attempts at revitalization over the past couple of years. As someone who has long seen the aesthetic potential of shooting a Dogme 95-esque moving-image project on a Coolpix or a PowerShot, I found the ~aestheticization~ cringe-worthy, but with the ire directed at myself rather than the scenesters. Perhaps I will include some digital images on another dispatch, but it doesn’t seem likely for now. The smeary oversaturated DV of Godard’s In Praise of Love is my guiding light in that direction, but now I fear that the use of 2000s low-grade digital will only be associated with music video hipsterdom and NYC alt-lit scene parties.
That being said, here are the images that cost me too much money over the last couple of years. I’m not gonna burn each and every shot in this post, as self-motivator to continue with a Part 2 soon. If a roll of HP5 (a standard cheap black-and-white stock) is $8, and there are 36 exposures, and it costs about $19 to get the film developed and scanned in HD, that comes out to about 75 cents per image. There are images in each roll that I would have paid upwards of $5 to create, and there are rolls that I get back with absolutely nothing worth looking at.
Sometimes you eat the film, sometimes the film eats you.
Have you guys heard enough about Eephus yet? Well, here is a picture from the production of the baseball indie, taken in October of 2022 on Portra 400 on a point-and-shoot that I borrowed from the film’s boom mic operator, Veronica Wood. Here, between set-ups, we see actors Nate, Pete, and Ethan (I think). The best part about an indie film like this is that there are gonna be 5 or 6 people in the cast/crew shooting BTS, all on different formats.
For as much as I bemoan the costs of film, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this butchered scan job by a lab in Glendale that will remain unnamed. On the left, we see the Sony Pictures lot, very early in the morning. I was working freelance as an Assistant Prop Master on Wheel of Fortune for a few weeks at the time. On the right, we see a gas station at dusk in scenic Grandview CA (a small neighborhood that overlaps the Burbank-Glendale border, my former home and the location of one of my favorite restaurants in the greater LA area, Adana). I can’t say for sure what stock I shot these on, because they are from around December 2022 and I wasn’t always keeping track back then.
Now, I also can’t say for sure what stock or even camera this was on, but I do know that my friend Roger is looking good as hell in front of a bunch of old Averill family photos. This roll came from my dad’s film collection, and I believe I used one of his cameras as well, for the occasion of my "Goodbye, Los Angeles” party in August of 2023. I drank a fair amount of wine (very rare for me) and took lots of pictures of my friends and family, because I thought I might never see them again. I moved back a year later.
Just a few days later, Charis and I made our voyage to the east coast. Here I am, shot on an HP5 black and white disposable, driving through Monument Valley. Of course we detoured through Monument Valley, I would have to revoke my John Ford fanclub card we didn’t.
This still life was taken on a Kodak Funsaver in September 2023 at a party thrown by my podcast cohost JT and his longtime friend/collaborator Niko in Center City, Philadelphia. Items include a bag of shitty east coast weed, a notebook sporting a sticker from the city’s 2nd-best record store, a loose DEVO sticker, and my personal favorite Philip Roth book. It’s not Philip Roth’s best book by any means, but it is the one entirely about inventing baseball narratives.
Shot on Lomochrome Turquoise in September 2023 (a very silly stock that you should probably not buy), here is the theater at Bryn Mawr where I saw a screening of The Last Days of Disco and introduced myself to Whit Stillman. He came over to my apartment a few days later to record a podcast.
In September 2023, I spent more money on film than any other month of my life. Here’s a shot on HP5 that I took on my aforementioned manual camera that eventually had to be retired due to light leaks. I will refer to this camera as The Unit. This shot of the Ritz theater in Center City belongs in the opening montage of 2013’s The Canyons. Despite the efforts of Barbenheimer, this cinema looks like a morgue, and is one of the worst that I’ve ever patronized.
New York City. This is my favorite photo I took in 2023. I don’t know anything about the neighborhoods of NYC that people across America and Substack seemingly have committed to memory, but I’m gonna use context clues here and call it “Chinatown”. Portra 400 on The Unit. Walking around New York is fucking exhilarating. I wanted to take a thousand pictures, so I switched over to the phone camera pretty early in the trip. None of those phone pictures are memorable, but I can call to mind this shot and a few others on this roll whenever I want.
On the same trip to New York, I also brought along a Kodak Funsaver that I thought I’d lost in the city. Turns out, it was just at the bottom of a bag for a year and a half. I finished off the roll, got it developed, and took an appropriately hazy, grainy trip down memory lane. Here is the Anthology Film Archives, where I took a small dose of mushrooms and watched a program of Stan Brakhage films on 16mm. The silence of the room made me giggly like a middle schooler at times, but the sheer textural pleasures on screen sent me into space. I stopped doing psychedelics around 2015 because I’m scared of deteriorating my already feeble mental state, but this was a nice treat.
Next time, on Money Shots: Lomochrome’s “Metropolitan” stock, the 2024 NBA Play-In Tournament, and more.