Making Friends in a Modern Economy
About the people behind the pictures we take
I just bought this vintage digital camera. I use the word vintage gently here so I don’t upset too many folks but the camera is almost 20 years old and vintage is as vintage does. These cameras have been all over my feed because they’re trendy now. All the hottest people online are urging you to run to your nearest craigslist ad and pick up one of these camera’s with the big shameless flash on it that makes everything feel and look crisp and stylized.
And they’re right. There is something so much more charming about these photos than those that come out of the prefixed and pre-optomized iPhone cameras built into all our phones. All the same. These point-and-shoot cameras have a charisma that translates as something that can make photos fun again. These cameras transform your puckered and ironic internet face into an image from back in the day- one to quench our nostalgia for a pre-algorithmic past.
When I was younger and streaming took the music world by storm, suddenly I saw my friends take up interest in buying vinyls of individual albums from individual artists for prices that, at the time, felt crazy. I couldn’t understand why, when we suddenly had the music we fought so hard to torrent, finally handed to us unlimitedly at our fingertips, why swaths of people would choose to go retro. Now the pattern is clearer to me.
The wealthy adopt the aesthetics of the working class; Suburban kids start using hip hop slang; And when technology reaches new wireless, contactless, buttonless milestones, culture reminisces on a world where we all had things to touch. When technology makes us limitless, the limitations of our old devices take on a new chic. Suddenly, I don’t want the uniformly programmed white balance of the iPhone 13 triple decker camera. I want something grainy- something that feels like AI can’t make my choices for me.
I found this camera shop on tiktok. I wanted one of these old digital cameras so badly that my phone plucked that silent thought from my mind and sold it to me on my screen. I swiped and saw a video of two girls vlogging their day in San Francisco’s chinatown- a wide section of the city that welcomes people with large replicas of a Chinese gateway at the neighborhood’s entrance. The red of that archway goes on forever in the red paper lanterns that line the streets of Chinatown all the way up the hills of San Francisco and as the girls moved through the vlog they shared a 2 second clip of what looked like an entire wall of vintage digital cameras. Another store clerk in another city had just told me that the old digital cams were hard to find because of their being discontinued. But there, in the vlog, was an entire wall of them in a glass case.
I was on tour in San Francisco and I went to Chinatown on a break between two performances. I walk through the archway, up the hill under the red canopy. I stopped at least twice on each block poking my head into any that looked like they might sell any type of electronics. Half an hour and a dozen stops in, I made it to CameraZone on Grant Avenue. Neon lights and stuffed walls. This was so obviously the only place that could be the place I was looking for.
Stepping inside I saw the wall. I met Rez, an Iranian father who owns this camera shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He’s been working with cameras for over 40 years on two sides of the world. Bald with glasses,a bit of chest tastefully poking out of a casual button-up- If his accent were Caribbean he could have been my uncle. And he treated me like family.
I asked too many questions. Questions about the camera, about the city. I asked about the photos of other people lining the wall. The young boy pictured with a camera that turned out to be his son who now works at the shop sometimes. He asked me where I was from, how long I’d be in San Francisco. I explained that the Broadway national tour of Tina: The Tina Turner musical was making a 4 week stop in San Francisco.
Rez told me. “My wife loves Broadway shows.”
As I paid for the digital camera, I asked, “Do you do repairs?”
In my luggage I had packed an old film camera that I’d been hoping to get fixed on the road. 1984. German. 35mm.Rez told me to bring it in so he could give me a diagnosis on the camera and a quote for the repair.
My mother taught me to always negotiate, though she never really taught me how.
I said “How about I try to get you two tickets to the show and you do what you can for my camera?”
“I love Broadway shows.” His wife poked her head out from around another counter.. She also works at the shop sometimes.
The story ends with Rez coming to see the show with the tickets I got him and my camera getting fixed. When I finished my first roll of film I emailed him digital copies of my first round of very blurry amateur pictures.
This isn’t a story about reducing all our economics to a bartering system. This is a story about value and values. The truth is, I paid out of pocket for the tickets that I gifted to Rez. As a company member, I got him better seats than he might have had, but they weren’t free. At the end of the day who knows what we exchanged, truly, in terms of the value passed between us. I don’t know how much a camera repair is worth. Or how much he would have charged me to rush the order- take it home to work on and return to me before my company left town. I could have spent more money than I might have spent to just pay him directly. I don’t care
Along with a repaired camera, I got something else out of our trade that never comes in the cold stack of bills or the plastic flick of a card. I learned something about that man. Through our conversations he invited me to take a closer look at the portraits on the walls. He asked me to watch my step when I walked behind the counter. I learned all about him, his shop, his wife who loves Broadway shows, and I got to trade him a piece of myself in exchange for the work he’s loved for 40 years. There is so much story that gets left off of all our receipts.
In another version of events, when people ask me where my camera came from, I’d say 1984, Germany- it cost me too much money to fix. In this version of things I get to say it’s vintage- my friend fixed it for me. This is my rebellion against the new wave of digital technology where goods and services are best delivered under a new shiny contactless option. This camera is my longing for a past where we all had things to touch- where we reached out to touch each other.