the disposable memory project: 25 cameras and counting

PB300140, originally uploaded by nhhk.

Nick H (owner of our most well travelled camera) has told us about his second drop:

It’s been to Cebu in the Philippines and the two attached photos of the
camera were taken there.

I’ve passed it on now to people leaving HK today so I’m not sure where it
is. 3 pictures had been taken by the time I handed it over.

All the photos from of this camera are up at flickr, and we’ll be creating the camera page later today.

P1010997.JPG, originally uploaded by Ferg.

Fergus J has been sent one of the new batch of cameras, and will be taking his to New York in the upcoming weeks. We’ve also lined up another bunch of new cambags which will be winging their way to those of you who I’ve been chatting to recently. Remember to let me know where they land, and send a photo!

Nicky and Asi have been secretly working away on this lovely book project. I’ll let Nicky explain:

So, what’s the idea ? Well it’s a bit of a cross between Pass the Parcel, Consequences, and the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. There’s 6 spreads in the book, and we’ve sent it to the most famous person we know to create something or leave a message, and then pass it on to the most famous person they know. Fingers crossed it will get to some exciting people along the way.

Lovely idea - something with a lovely crossover with our project I think. They should attach a camera to the book ;) Good luck with the project guys, and let me know when you auction it off.

I pulled out my digital camera, turned it on, and started fiddling with f-stops and zooming out to get just the right picture. At that moment I wished so badly that I could just take the picture without having to worry about any of these things. Just try to take the picture. Not have to worry about any of these things. Not able to worry about these things because they would be beyond my control.

I stumbled across the Single Use/Disposable Camera Project at Flickr from Dуℓап tonight.

Digital photography has, without discussion, revolutionised photography - and most importantly has made it massively accessible, enabling anyone to take and share images with the world at very low cost. Removing the effort and care needed when taking an image with film, or rather the high potential for error, has effects on both side of the coin though. Has being able to take hundreds of photos without thought devalued what a photograph means? I’m not a particularly good photographer, but odds are if I take enough images, one will be good that I post online. I throw away far more images than I keep. This is one of the meanings of ‘disposable’. Would I end up with better images if I spent more time composing shots, thinking about getting it ‘right’, rather than rattling off a dozen frames?

I think having the ‘black box’ of a film camera, and even more so a camera which you’re not sure you’ll ever see again, and don’t have the duty of care over, contextualises the image in a very different space. The image means more - it’s part of a story, one chance to capture a moment without an option to undo or revert, but at the same time is it throw-away, you’re not paying for it, you don’t care about the end product so much - so in part the action of capturing the moment is more important than the actual image or composition itself. It’s a memory captured and then lost until the message in the bottle finds its next carer. I think its an interesting contradiction.

ADAM NEATE: The London Show

As dusk falls on Friday 14th November, Adam Neate will be claiming the streets of London as his gallery by leaving 1000 artworks scattered across the city.

If you’ve a spare £400 to spend, does anyone fancy buying a copy of this, and letting me know whether there is a market for the Disposable Memory Project in India.

In order to estimate the latent demand for disposable cameras across the states or union territories and cites of India, we used a multi-stage approach. Before applying the approach, one needs a basic theory from which such estimates are created. In this case, we heavily rely on the use of certain basic economic assumptions. In particular, there is an assumption governing the shape and type of aggregate latent demand functions.

Tres random.

A project ‘inspired by’ our site has recently launched in the US. Meandering Cameras, setup by Alvin Liang and from Cambridge, Massachusetts is doing a pretty similar thing to us, and kudos to him for pushing on at a much faster rate than I have been doing! Alvin, I’d love to have a camera of yours and I’ll send you one of ours if you wanna do a swap!

http://www.meanderingcamera.com

Ben M at Burning Man, originally uploaded by webponce.

Camera 13 was left at Burning Man this year by Ben M. This photo was taken by the ’saucy nurse’ who took the camera:

I finally managed to scan the postcard which was made by the girl I gave the camera to at Burning Man. So it’s attached. She took a pic of me and printed in onto a postcard which I sent home to myself. I gave her the camera.

You can follow Camera 13’s progress at the tracker.

Matt Jones, also of Dopplr, at Picnic

Apologies for not writing this up sooner - but I’ve recently started a new job which has been taking up most of my life. An update on the Amsterdam Five which were left whilst I was attending Picnic 08:

Camera 18 - handed over to Boris from Dopplr, who I managed to corner whilst he was standing waiting for a coffee. Dopplr is an awesome application which tracks your movements around the globe, so it a wonderful kindred spirit to our project. Matt Jones, also of Dopplr, presented an interesting talk on ‘the emerging realtime social web’. Here’s hoping that it makes its way around the world with one of the people from there.

Camera 19 - given to Andy B, who is a friend of mine from adidas, based in Amsterdam.

Camera 20 - given to Remko, who was also attending the Picnic 08 conference, seen here as the proud owner of the new camera.

Camera 21 - handed over to Gemma B, who works at de-construct amsterdam, and is a keen traveller herself.

Camera 22 - we went back to the original spirit of the project and left this one in plain site in the main auditorium on the last day of Picnic. It had already disappeared by the time I walked past it an hour later, so let’s hope we hear back.

Don’t forget to let us know if you picked up these cameras!

Here’s a tall tale from Nick on the journey of the camera we gave him back in August.

Sorry it’s taken so long to register the camera. Here’s a quick summary
(with Google map locations of where I know it’s been.)

Our story begins in London where you gave me the cameras

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The camera then ventured to Hong Kong

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It missed its connecting flight in Vancouver and the next plane got to the
end of the runway and broke down

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It was handed over and spent the week in Montreal

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It stopped over here for breakfast

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It was returned to me here as the person I’d handed it over to thought that
I’d left it behind so they kindly returned it to me.

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According to my calculation from distances on Google, the camera has already
travelled 22,344 miles (+/-) with the sum total of one photo being taken. I
think this camera deserves the award for having the largest carbon footprint
per photo taken. That said, it has been handed over again and its last
known location was here:

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I believe it’s now on the way to Thailand.

Thanks Nick. Although you’re one of the planet’s nemesis, we love you for taking it on such a journey without managing to take any photos ;) This camera isn’t actually on the tracker yet - i have several to add this weekend. If you’ve got a camera, and haven’t told us where it went yet, let us know!