Disposable Cameras

Photography used to be about suspense.  Time was, taking pictures meant waiting for the film to come back from the developers – what was on there?  How had it turned out?  Now a person can review their shots on the spot in practically unlimited quantities, filling whole memory cards with infinitesimally different images of the same scene.  The advent of digital has made the photographic experience throwaway in the wrong way – with digital, people throw away enjoyment, becoming disengaged from whatever place or event they are photographing.  That is why disposable cameras, once the poor cousin of everything else photographic, are finally coming of age. 

Disposable cameras are (like digital ones) extremely portable.  Disposable cameras cost little more than the price of a standard film.  Like digital cameras, they tend to be used for throwaway shots, capturing moments in a person’s everyday experience.  Unlike digital, though, disposable cameras don’t give a person instant access to the picture they’ve just taken.  Like the old style film cameras of all stripes, disposable cameras come with a built in delay between shutter press and image viewing.

Why is this good?  Remember the process of revelation that came with every freshly-opened packet of pictures.  Disposable cameras give that magic back to the photographer.  Collecting the developed reel; opening the envelope; seeing, for the first time, the brightly-coloured rectangles of stiff shiny paper.  The only gasps of recognition, smiles of recollection, available in modern photography are those uttered when pictures taken on disposable cameras come back from the chemists.

The thing is:  photography in its purest form is about memory.  It’s about memorialising a moment that is then hidden, waiting in the bowels of the camera (and so, these days, only really in the guts of disposable cameras) until the reel is finished and the images developed.  Those images, freshly seen, give an unparalleled experience of memory, coloured as they are by the difference between recollections (what did we shoot?  Why did we take those pictures?) and reality.  Disposable cameras are the only things still capable of eliciting a shout of surprise (don’t remember taking that!).  The mystery element of photography is only alive in disposable cameras.

Disposable cameras are not antisocial:  digital cameras are.  Ever seen someone hunched over the little glowing screen of their digital, intently shuffling and deleting hundreds of practically identical images?  They’ll only re-engage with what is happening around them for long enough to take another fifty pictures, which they then spend an hour reviewing and editing.  Disposable cameras don’t let a photographer do that – which means that disposable cameras force photographers to maintain an active human connection with the event or thing they are photographing.