Hey, stranger.
I thought it would take years of forced acceptance toward photos of myself, but all it took was developing one roll of film for me to feel beautiful. I wish that sentence started out less sad and ended less earnestly, but here we are.
The first roll of film I ever shot and developed was full of badly framed images, blurry smiles, and the corner of a table. The second roll, however, is still my favorite collection of photos I’ve taken. It was from the summer of 2023—right after I graduated college. I remember opening the Dropbox link from PandaLab while waiting for the bus home from work, my hands dry from washing dishes in bleach. In one of the initial frames, I saw my own face on my phone’s screen, a half smile on my lips. For the first time in my life, I thought, Oh, there I am.
Usually, there’s a sense of distortion when I see photos of myself, like my face has been taken apart and put back together by someone who didn’t know what I look like. I would often look away when someone showed me a photo they’d taken, only to dissect it later, alone. god, do I really look like that? My fingers would zoom in, panicking, because the girl I saw in the mirror was not the girl in the photo. She wasn’t even in the same ballpark. It drove me crazy.
But earlier that winter, before I ever saw that infamous photo, I started dating Michael. He’d pause on the sidewalk, take his camera out of its case, line up a shot of the light hitting the side of a building, and slip the camera back into his bag.
“What are you taking a photo of?” I’d ask him.
“Just this wall. I like the way the light is hitting it.” He would hold the camera still for a moment, snap a shot, and then motion to me, “stand over there, I want to get one of you.”
There was no checking the shot, just a quiet prayer that, in a few months, when the roll was developed, it would turn out well. I wanted in. That day, I pulled out the old Pentax point-and-shoot I had bought on eBay for $40 four years earlier. There were four shots left. The rest, as they say, is history.
My last year in Seattle is documented in flawed, inconsistent bursts of film photos, now stored in their own folder on my hard drive. When I want to reminisce, I rarely scroll through the hundreds of photos on my phone. Instead, I always return to the ones that represent that time in my life most beautifully. I haven’t decided whether the grainy quality of my film photos increases the romance of a moment or if it’s the imperfection itself that’s beautiful. But I do know that when I get a roll developed, I never hate the way I look. Even the shot of me mid-vodka shot, face wincing, still feels charming.
There’s something about seeing myself in film that’s different—like I’m caught in a moment, preserved like a bug in amber. And maybe that’s where the forgiveness comes in: not in the lack of perfection, but in the surprise of something pretty caught unplanned, unscripted. The cup of coffee is out of frame. My friend’s face is completely blurry. I’m not posed. I’m simply there, as I was.
Here is the truth, unfiltered: I think women are often taught to pursue being beautiful beyond anything else. I hate this. I wasted years of my life worrying about what I looked like. But here is the second truth: it feels really good to feel beautiful. If solely capturing my surroundings on film is what allows me to love what I look like, then it is reason enough to keep buying those 20 dollar Porta 400 rolls.
And it’s not just myself I like in film photos—it’s everything. Everyone. I catch myself jumping up and down when I take a good photo of a friend, sending it to them with a flurry of texts: !!!!!! You look so pretty!!!! Even the smallest details, like a street corner or a forgotten moment, feel so much more alive when captured on film. Even though I am not the best photographer— I always have to look up what a higher aperture means— my mediocrity in taking photos is often what I like best about them. The accidental long exposure or strange focus or tilted angles all remind me that I’m often taking photos while I’m in the moment, just pausing briefly to say wait let me get a photo of this before returning my camera to its case. They remind me that I’ve done the impossible: I’ve caught a moment while I was still inside of it. Everything is more beautiful to me on film, not just myself (vain as I am), and I consider myself very lucky that I’ve found a way to remind myself of that.
I used to clean my apartment to a new record every week, turning the speakers up loud enough to hear over the hum of the vacuum. I’d put on a face mask and sing along to Amy Winehouse or Jeff Buckley or Norah Jones, letting myself listen to albums front to back. It was my way of being fully present, of appreciating art as it was intended. Taking photos on my film camera, prioritizing it over my phone, has become a similar practice. Just like I rediscover favorite songs when I listen uninterrupted, I am reminded of days that I haven’t thought about in years on old rolls of film. And just like I have to listen to a track I don’t enjoy, the wait to get my photos is excruciating. The process is the gift. A blurry shot of a pool table from last summer was a disappointment when I first developed it, but now it just reminds me that I was laughing too hard to focus the camera.
xoxo,
Evie
I recently started posting my favorite film photos on @by__evie on instagram, but here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:
Gorgeous photos & article. I’ve been debating getting into film photography for soooo long and you might’ve just convinced me
This made me so emotional :’)))) 100000% agree with all of this. My fiancé and his family got me 2 film cameras for my birthday (a yashica t3 and a Nikon n6006) and it’s been a game changer for capturing my life. Everything feels so much more beautiful and intentional when you can’t do a photo burst on your phone and instead just take one great photo. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your beautiful photos! THE DOUBLE EXPOSURE ONE AHHH obsessed!