True Grit

Barley, a dog, is photographed relaxing on the futon. The image quality is weirdly grainy in a way that only the lowest-cost image sensor on the market can provide.

There is a slice of time in the photo-record of Barley’s adventures in which the images, while digital, have a kind of grain that feels unnatural in an era of surprisingly powerful phone cameras. Its trademark is an even scattering of dark motes, as if the photo had received a very light dusting of soot from a passing chimneysweep’s broom. During this period of time, my phone of many years had given up the ghost: It was never not hot to the touch, and (despite multiple battery replacements) could no longer hold a charge for more than a couple hours. So, as a stopgap, my phone company provided me what I thought of as the Pity Phone: a burner in all but name, retailing at around $30, whose CPU was so underpowered that it needed to run a comically toybox custom fork of Android. The phone had a camera, as all modern smart phones do. Nevertheless, the combination of the cheapest sensor money can buy and a puny CPU with no spare clock cycles to gussy up a noisy image resulted in photography that was literally the least one could do: Simultaneously blurrier and crunchier than you would want, a look so distinctive it effectively becomes its own data-moshed aesthetic.