Photographic Memories
A project by Mark Selby.
Photographs can act as powerful mnemonic representations of our personal memories, indicative of time, place and experience. However as digital photographic technologies strive for ease, convenience and instantaneity, photographs are mass–produced. The camera democratizes experience, recording differing experiences in identical ways. Often not valued as memories, photographs become mundane representations of unremarkable and unfamiliar events whose mnemonic value is increasingly diluted.
Photographic Memories is an ongoing project that intends to make photography an integral component of experience. Like the map, or the ticket, the camera becomes necessary to the journey. Here photography encourages the experience of travel, capturing it in ways more appropriate to the activity.
Oct 22
A short video storyboarding the use of the GPS Camera.
The camera aims to encourage exploration and promote the travelling experience through photography, rather than travel being focussed on photography.
Oct 21
A map of Europe with the travel route marked on it.
Can photography be used to further the exploration while travelling. Can photography encourage travel rather than taking hundreds of pictures of the same things.
Oct 20
The finished, working ticket camera at the Anomalies exhibition.
Inserting a ticket into the camera allows the camera to be turned on; without the ticket the camera is disabled. The trigger button is a hole punch, so that when you take a photo a hole is punched in the ticked.
The proposed scenario is that the camera would come with a set of tickets with which to make a trip. After using each ticket to get to a destination, the used ticked it used to take photographs of that destination. So each ticket is physically marked according to how many photo’s you took in that place, and therefore reflects experience.
Eventually the ticket is too full of hole to be inserted into the switch, so it is time to use another ticket to travel elsewhere, and so on.
Testing the ticket camera.
Oct 19
Rough assembly of the ticket camera to test the switch
When a ticket is inserted into the slot the camera is turned on. The switch is pretty much the same as the one used in the one shot camera earlier in the project.
