the disposable memory project: 30 cameras and counting

Video Blog above, but for those of you who can’t see the video, here’s the text only version.
First of all, some updates on new cameras being sent out in to the wild:

Camera 25, which brings us up to our quarter century, was given out over a meal of Ox Heart and Snails in East Dulwich on Wednesday night to Amy T.

Camera 26 was handed over to Simon A, after I met him at the Spectator dinner for a charity I’m involved in.

Camera 27 was a DIY camera bag created by Barry D in Liverpool, and has been hand-carried to Barcelona and dropped off at the Sagrada Familia. We’re awaiting more news on the drop off point.

In other news, we’re changed the instructions on the cards included in the camera bags, as well as on the cameras. The new wording attempts to bring people to the website if they find a camera, so more emphasis on letting us know where you’ve found cameras. Hopefully this will make more people respond when they find a camera. We’ve also made each URL on the camera unique, so we can get an idea if people are visiting the site, but not telling us, so at least we know our little disposables have found a new owner. If you are creating your own camera bags, don’t forget to tell us, so we can give you a unique code, so you’re able put this on your camera and make the most of the new tracking.

And finally (always the light hearted story), we’ve been blogged about by the lovely people at moo.com, who think our project is right up their street. Yay! to use a moo phrase. We love moo, and use them for the postcards you’ll find with the cameras - but also now we have lovely Disposable Memory Project stickers containing our kinda logo thingy - a play on the Keep Britain Tidy man, but ours is tossing away a camera. I’ll be putting a handful of stickers in each camera bag, so feel free to plaster yourself with them.

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.

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.