I was only slightly ahead of the tide when through my last year of high school, I carried around an AE-1 loaded with Fujifilm I bought off Amazon, which I periodically drove 40 minutes into Seattle Center to get developed and scanned onto a CD, and then uploaded to my laptop, and then uploaded to the internet. It was a whole lot of hubbub for someone who also carried on her, at all times, a 12-megapixel-camera-equipped iPhone.
I’ve since continued shooting film, a few rolls a month, up until this August. My last roll was from a trip to Cannon Beach, which I have yet to scan. On November 1st, I downloaded Lapse, which has temporarily staunched my desire to load another roll of film, as well as my compulsion to share personal images on Instagram.
Lately, my sole mission when interacting with any group of people has been to try to get them to also join Lapse - the newest photo sharing app to join the likes of Instagram and BeReal. It doesn’t help my case as a 20something year-old (seemingly) unemployed white woman that the app’s recruiting strategy is something of an MLM. You can only use Lapse if you were first invited by a friend, and only after also inviting five (sometimes eight?) friends of your own who aren’t already participating. On our nights out, the friends I’ve successfully recruited have taken to saying “I’m Lapsing” (occasionally, “I’m ProLapsing”) when they use the app to take photos, which I always get a good chuckle out of.
For my uninitiated readers, I’ll explain:
On Lapse, users can take as many snapshots as they want throughout the day, but before the photos are viewable, they go to “the darkroom” for “developing”, where they’re given a predetermined filter that’s grainy and heavy on the red and gives all your shadows a pleasing blue-green tint. From what I can tell, images are held in “darkroom timeout” for anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, both manufacturing an experience of delayed gratification, and stopping users from critically analyzing their photos as they take them, and thus ruining the moment.
In using the app, you are agreeing to exchange your time for your creative power. The automatic post-processing is a relief to some, who already suffer decision fatigue from every other customizable app, website, sandwich, dog food, etc. Even the process of curation is restrained to a Tinder-esque swipe to share or discard each photo.
Where BeReal addresses a lack of authenticity online, Lapse attempts to offer a solution to the obsessive and distracting documentation of our young lives that many have fallen victim to. Lapse sees a world of people crippled by the standards of the online personas they’ve built for themselves. Every moment of joy they could be spending with friends has been stolen by their public-facing online selves, who in order to remain alive, must feast on newly generated content disguised as perfect yet authentic memories. If we can’t stop shitting, the app seems to say, we can at least stop shitting where we eat.
For the last two months I took most of my photos on Lapse, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the activity of it all, I find myself regretful that those two months will forever have a disposable camera filter baked into them. I haven’t decided yet whether that will bar me from using the app in the future.
The thing is, we’re all unsatisfied with Instagram, but is there actually a hole that needs to be filled? Or are apps like Lapse a momentarily bright but sputtering attempt to revive the early Instagram dream of saturated images that serve to define you through your chosen aesthetic. Is Lapse even appealing to younger people who didn’t grow up in that era of VSCO and Tumblr - people who never spiraled when the vacation snapshot they looked best in didn’t fit their feed’s color story?
I’m sorry to say I don’t think Lapse will last much longer, and it’s not the interface or concept that’ll spell its end, but the filter aesthetic they chose to run with.
We want the tool our parents used to take pictures of us, but we’ll settle for its skeuomorph. And as each new generation cycles through to adulthood, so will the aesthetic they’re most nostalgic for. In a few years, they’ll be imitating these very imitations, and we’ll be mad about it, and so it goes, and so we move forward.
But between each nostalgia indulgence, we’ll experiment with new technologies. Like BeReal and Instagram Photo Dumps, Lapse is decidedly casual, in the way that it is authentic, in the way that it is lazy. Very soon, I think, we’ll stop being impressed by casual. Very soon, we’ll be putting in more effort, and letting our efforts show. We’ll be taking less and making more. We’ll be trying to race toward something new. At the very least, we’ll be making it look like we are.