Molly Matalon is making her majestic photo diaries with “a crappy little point-and-shoot from 2004”

Since we last caught up with photographer Molly Matalon, she has been sharpening up her commercial work on new projects, selling out of photobooks (A Man Loves a Woman) in pandemic lockdowns, and — importantly — has adopted a rescue dog called Disco. Squeezing in some more personal work, over the last few years, Molly has been documenting the days passing her by with intimate digital photo diaries.

Snapping home movie style photos of her everyday surroundings, “usually not thinking anything more than ‘oh that’s nice’’’, the photographer is creating archives of months past as “a fun way to look back”. She explains: “These are subjects that have always existed in my work — stuff I see when I go on walks in the early morning or end of the day, the light in my kitchen, silly things I see on the street, lots of pictures of my dog and flowers, really just simple things that make me smile — but it’s the approach that’s changed,” she shares.

No longer reaching for her big film camera, the artist has turned to “a crappy little point-and-shoot from like 2004” for her image making. “It’s been very valuable to stop taking pictures on my phone that I surely will never look at again. But also not always having to take a slow, potentially wasteful film picture with the big camera is liberating,” she tells us. Before this, Molly didn’t shoot digital in her free time — a separation from her commercial work, not for “any kind of pretentious ‘film is not dead!’ reason”, but more just financial. Also the film cameras on which the photographer previously caught more personal moments “don’t really fit in my bag”, she says — a problem we all know too well. Whilst these hefty lenses have been good in the past for slow and international images, Molly now quite likes the quick, in-the-moment stuff that a tiny digital companion allows.

Family heirlooms from her grandfather’s photography days, these pocket tools are what Molly calls “embarrassingly bad cameras… but that’s kinda what I love about them”, the photographer says, “There’s something beautiful and nostalgic to me about the colours and quality. The files are tiny and awful, you have barely any creative control over your picture, and for me that’s incredibly liberating.”

Freezing moments so natural it’s as if images are made by blinking, the photographer hopes her digital diaries evoke warm feelings of familiarity, and give a new value to the everyday. “Not just familiar in the sense of ‘oh my life is also like this’ but also in the sense of ‘oh yeah Molly definitely took this’... I mean that’s the hope anyway.” With people often feeling like they know the places or people in her pictures, the photographer has had “friends who are servers at restaurants be stopped at their table to ask if they are in any ‘Molly Matalon’ photos”, she says. “I’m not taking pictures of anything crazy, but maybe that’s what's working?”