the disposable memory project

I found another really nice project this morning, where Nat Friedman and friends handed out a whole load of disposable cameras to the kids in the poorest areas of Rio. The images captured are fascinating and moving, as well as just great pics.

The return rate was pretty good; many of the kids were waiting in the street from 7am to noon for us to pick up their cameras. We got 26 back out of maybe 32 we handed out. This amounted to 632 photos. Many of them are excellent, especially for someone who’s probably never used a camera before, and with a cheap disposable. Some are sad, some are funny.

You can read the full story at http://nat.org/rocinha/

A big part of the project is inviting people around the world to take part by creating their own camera bags. We have a number of fantastic people who have signed up to help out – their reasons for getting involved as are varied as the locations they write to us from.

Tracy, who very recently agreed to take part, told us about another ‘pass it on’ type project she’d been involved in before, although using slightly different medium:

Just for fun – I took part in a fun project many, many, years ago called the “nicker exchange” which was a sort of like a chain letter when you joined you had to buy a pair of nickers in the persons size who was at the top of the chain letter and then send it in the post to the person at the top of the chain, who received a lovely pair of NEW drawers in the post every couple of days.

Glad to see ideas come in all shapes and sizes! You’ll see Tracy’s camera on the website in the next few weeks

I would love to pass the camera around and have people take pictures of their favourite pair of shoes, the camera could also travel around the world as I have many friends that travel

Welcome to Tracy and all of the wonderful people who have already created camera bags for us, or are in the process of doing so.

Lovely related project being run by Tim Devin – a custom magazine created collaboratively by a community and left somewhere for a passerby to read.

http://timdevin.com/ileftthishereforyoutoread-about.html

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

In related project news, well relatedish, I stumbled across the Disposable Film Festival whilst reading my morning fix of RSS. Submission rules are that the camera the films are created with are things like webcams, digital cameras, mobile phones; rather than anything designed with the express purpose of shooting video or film. It looks set to be an interesting contest.

A thoroughly veiled reference to the disposable memory project was written in the Times a few days back. Talking about the £50 Danger Fund, they mention the first donation which was immediately claimed back. In fairness, I didn’t want the £50 back for my own project exactly, but if it works out like that, that’s way too meta. If you’ve not seen it yet, check out the danger fund – its a brilliant idea, and with just a few quid, you could help create something special and (rowr) dangerous.