On Grainy Days
It began, as many of my problems do, with a recommendation. Not from a friend; friends recommend restaurants, or divorce lawyers; but from the YouTube algorithm, which has studied me the way a taxidermist studies a fox, knowing precisely which of my organs to hollow out first. The video showed a young man with a moustache looking borrowed from a 1970s US highway patrolman, and he opened by saying "howdy" to no one in particular, the way you might greet a horse that you were not sure about. He was holding a camera that took film, which is to say a camera that costs money every single time you press the button, and he seemed delighted about this, the way certain people are delighted by fasting, marathons or the reform party.
What I could not get over was the reverence. Here was a man cradling a plastic point-and-shoot he'd rescued from a thrift store shelf; twelve dollars, wedged between a fondue set and a VHS copy of someone's christening; and he presented it to the camera the way a priest presents the Eucharist . Then he'd wander around photographing things nobody in their right mind would photograph: a fence, a puddle, the side of an abandoned building that even the building seemed embarrassed about. And the photos would come back grainy and soft and slightly wrong, and he would look at them with an expression of such profound satisfaction that I began to wonder if I'd been living my entire life incorrectly, chasing composition like a fool, when apparently the whole point was to make everything look like a memory you weren't sure wasn’t implanted by aliens yet to subscribe to Adobe.
I mentioned the channel to a friend, who said, "So you watch a man take bad pictures on purpose," and I said no, no, you don't understand, it's *funny*, he does these little sketches, he'll deadpan a joke about film stocks the way my father used to deadpan jokes about the neighbors, and then before you know it he's cut to himself standing in a field for no reason. She asked how many videos I'd watched, and I did the thing where you say "a few" while privately calculating that it was closer to sixty, and that I had also, in a related incident, purchased three lenses for a camera I did not yet own. This is the true genius of the man. He doesn't sell you anything. He simply stands there, moustachioed and content, until you sell things to yourself.
But here is where I've decided the charm actually is, and I say this as someone who has resisted charm professionally for decades: he is not pretending the pictures matter. That's the trick everyone else misses. The rest of the internet is out there sharpening and polishing and correcting, holding up their images like report cards, and this man is off in some parking lot cheerfully wasting film the way the rest of us waste afternoons. Which is to say, not wasting them at all. The grain isn't a flaw, it turns out. It's the consequence of someone having a nice time. And there is something almost unbearably comforting about watching a person enjoy an imperfect thing on purpose, in a Linked-In world that keeps insisting, loudly and at great expense, that we shouldn't.
