We were invited to talk about the Disposable Memory Project at a recent advertising industry event called ‘Game Changers’. It was the first time I’d been asked to present something about the project, and I had to fill 20 minutes, so apologies for the rambling, but hopefully you might find some of the background to the project interesting.
Matt Knight, The Disposable Memory Project, “Game Changers: Free” from The IPA on Vimeo.
We’re approaching our big milestone of 200 cameras being released, and to celebrate, we’ll be giving a little prize to the person who drops our 200th camera.
If you’ve already got a camera code and haven’t dropped a camera yet, now is a perfect time to do it.
If you’ve not got a camera code yet, sign up here, and we’ll send you instructions on how to create your own camera drop.
The rules are pretty simple to enter:
1. Create a camera and drop it somewhere / hand it over to someone else
2. Take a photo of your drop/handover
3. Email us with details of the camera, and if you’re the 200th to be posted on the site – you’ll win!
The prize is something in keeping with the project, and just a way of saying thanks for helping us reach our 200th Camera dropped. We’ll be posting a longer blog entry at 200 with a review of the project to date.
Monika A. has emailed to tell us a bit more about her Camera 93, which later this week will be making the mammoth journey to an Everest Basecamp in Nepal. We asked her about the trip she is making.
The Project: So where is the camera currently?
Monika A: Burgdorf near Hanover, Germany
DMP: And why are you going to Everest?
Monika: Generally I am very interested in foreign countries, their landscape and the people who live there. That’s why I love to travel.
Nepal – and especially the himalayas – is a destination that on the one hand I always wanted to visit – on the other hand I wasn’t sure if I would ever manage to get there.
When Jon and Chris (my significant other) decided to organize a trek to Everest Base Camp in Nepal as a photography and videography workshop it was clear for me that this would my opportunity to be part of a unique experience.
Did I mention that I am very passionate about photography? This journey is a great chance to combine both hobbies as the trek will offer the environment to take all kinds (and lots!!) of photographs. I am really looking forward to receiving many many new impressions, which may also push my photography to a new level.
DMP: How can we follow your journey?
Monika: You can get trek updates (on a probably daily basis) on http://netvibes.com/everesttrek
DMP: We’ll be following you closely, and best of luck!
Monika: Thanks – keep your fingers crossed that I don’t get altitude sick :-)
You can read more about the project at http://www.everesttrek2009.com/ and of course, we’ll be charting its progress on our own Camera 93 page.
Good luck to Monika and the rest of the team. This may be our most amazing camera drop yet!
We’ve passed a milestone today, in that the project is one year old.
Happy birthday!
To celebrate, I thought we’d cover some of the statistics from the project.
and of course, 3 cameras returned!
But wait! As if the camera gods are sending us a celebratory birthday present (somewhat like last year’s xmas present!), we received this email from Nina R. in Frankfurt this evening:
we found one and finished it. What to do next?
I imagine this is Camera 73, but we shall wait for a more detailed response and let you know.
Not bad for our first twelve months. Thanks to everyone who has been involved, and as Jon C (of Camera 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 and 70) tweeted:
@foundacam Happy birthday. May there be many more years of Disposable Memory ;-)
You may have noticed that we’ve had a little tidy up around here, and redesigned the site. We felt that the old design wasn’t doing justice to the wonderful images we have back from the three cameras returned, so the digital elves toiled night and day to create this vision you see before you.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new site, but we don’t have commenting setup properly yet – so please drop us an email (details are on the contact page), in our facebook group, flickr group or send us a message on twitter. We’re all over the internets!
In other news, the project is going on holiday next week, hand delivering some cameras to south america, so apologies if you write to us and don’t hear back for a little while!
Whoo! The images from our very first camera to be returned are now online in the flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/photos/disposablememoryproject/sets/72157612468305465/
Thanks to Melanie for creating the camera, and BlazeNFoote for sending it back, as well as everyone who featured in the images. We’ll be making more of the images on the Camera 29 page in due course.
If you took any of the photos, or appear in them, or can even help us identify location, email us, or comment on the images in flickr or below, and we’ll update the images to help tell their story.
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.
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.
