By Andrew Liszewski
It’s probably not a concept that Nikon or Canon are going to embrace any time soon, but if you don’t have much confidence in your photography skills, Sascha Pohflepp’s blind ‘Buttons’ camera will certainly appeal to you. It’s actually part of their ‘Blinks and Buttons’ art exhibit, and as you can see in the photos, the camera has no lens, no sensor and no optics whatsoever. Just a faux shutter button that triggers a cellphone hidden inside to retrieve and display a photo from Flickr that was taken at the exact same moment. So in a manner of speaking, the Buttons camera actually takes other people’s photos.
And since the camera was created as part of an art piece, I feel obligated to share the artist’s ‘motivations’ and ‘inspirations’ behind it:
Taking a photo means making a memory. Choosing a moment in time and framing a situation. Archiving it or making it public. Either way, we create a visual item that we have an emotional attachment to through our memory. Photos help us to remember moments in our past. Often they even become a memory in their own right. For many, making their moments public through services like Flickr is already part the process of photography itself, creating archives which contain a vast collection of visual fragments of individual lives.
[ Buttons – A Blind Camera ] VIA [ @ronbrinkmann ]
it’s only a small media player
Interesting idea, but how many pictures get uploaded to Flickr the same second they’re taken? Does the camera wait for a while before attempting to pull images that correspond to the moment at which you pressed the shutter?