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Initially, I hoped to make a video relating time and dance. When I knew that wouldn’t turn out as I would hope, I changed paths to making something physical out of film negatives. When I knew that was unrealistic because of lack of resources, I had to challenge myself to think of something else. A late night thought came to me that combined my past and present. I asked friends, near and far, to fill up a disposable camera and send it to me to develop. With the developed photographs, I compiled them into a book to show differences in experiences amongst all of us. But, then I wondered how different a group of 20-somethings’ experiences really could be? I mean, we really all do the same things: going out, messing around, exploring new places, and filling up empty time doing whatever comes to mind. I hoped to document this in a very candid way through disposable cameras because of not only the element of surprise of seeing the images after the fact, rather than the real-time of iPhones, and also the twinge of nostalgia of looking back and seeing what all your friends are up to in a completely non-curated way than social media.
Process:
- After receiving the cameras, I had them developed. Surprisingly, it’s a lot harder to find a place in the city to develop disposable cameras than I thought it would be.
- I scanned and cropped all of the pictures to my computer so when I had the layout figured out it would be easy to upload them.
- I set out all of the physical photographs throughout my apartment so I could tangibly organize the pictures.
- After I had a rough draft of the layout, I found out that the maximum amount of pages I could order was 30 so I had to drastically reduce the amount of pictures I used. I went through, and decided to cut back on place pictures and use more pictures of people. My next challenge was to reorganize the pictures I decided to use so the themes weren’t too repetitive.
- Finally, I went to the Walgreens website to put my book order through. As I was placing the pictures into the layout, I slightly changed the original layout when I saw how it would actually look- putting more pictures to one page, etc.
Shown above is my process of taping pictures onto paper to get an idea of how the pictures would look in book format.
Layout in InDesign.
Final book.
