Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Oct. 22-28

All of Us Strangers, 1989 (Taylor's Version), Malignant, and more!!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for for paid subscribers. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’m watching, reading, playing, and listening to. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or Letterboxd. Thank you for reading!

There are a few more days of the Fran Magazine Halloween sale

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Story time

My maternal grandfather died almost nine years ago, and though it has been a long near-decade since then, the weight of his loss still feels insurmountable. He left behind so much, not only in memory but in tchotchkes and records, boxes of which feel difficult to rummage through even with the gift of distance. Earlier this year, I helped my mom go through a few initial boxes, and we came across a handful of vacation photos my grandpa had taken at some point in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beneath those photos were the camera they were taken on: his Minolta A-2, a mechanical camera first introduced in 1955. Unless you are a photography head, the nature of a mechanical camera might be otherwise unknown to you: there’s no flash, no autofocus, no automatic aperture. You have to have the good light, the eye for focus, a lightmeter (or instinct) to know that the film gets the right amount of film. Beyond that, you have to handcrank the film, manually set the film counter, all this stuff. This isn’t hard — it’s actually quite intuitive. But as someone who hasn’t taken a film photography class since high school, it’s required a bit of relearning.