Why I Still Buy Expensive A** Disposable Cameras
…and you should, too.
From the day we got married in our living room to the George Floyd protests, we captured them on our disposable camera.
Only one picture exists of my great-grandfather. I’ve never seen a picture of anybody in my family beyond his generation and for many reasons, that’s not necessarily rare, especially for Black Americans. I mean…enslaved people typically didn’t have the luxury of having their pictures taken for their personal use. Even when pictures were captured, the names of the enslaved were often changed, making the pictures difficult to trace and decipher. Many times, I’ve wondered what my great-great-grandmother looks like. I wonder where she lived. I wonder how she wore her hair. I want to see what she saw, and the cold truth is that I will never know. For this reason, I feel obligated to capture life as we know it for the sake of future generations and become intentional about building my family’s archive.
We’re so wrapped up in a digital world that we forget about tangible artifacts. Those pictures on your computer may not remain accessible and your IG feed can’t be preserved forever. Even though printed pictures are easy to lose and damage, I consider them raw backups to a digital archive. At this point, you might be wondering why I’m advocating for the use of disposable cameras, specifically. Though buying a camera and paying to get the film developed is rather pricey (costs about $30 altogether), it’s worth the investment if you can afford it. Let me explain why…
The main benefit of using a disposable camera is that the images aren’t heavily curated/altered, unlike our social media. I take hundreds of pictures just to make ONE post for social media, and I can do that because I use a digital camera. Unlimited “film” means more opportunity to manipulate the subject. With a disposable, you have to be very intentional with every shot because there is limited film. The result is usually a much more authentic snapshot of that moment in time, which is much more valuable. Another benefit is what I like to call “nostalgic discovery.” Remember that time you were cleaning out an old box and stumbled upon an old cd or picture from high school? The memories flood back immediately and that joy is unmatched. Discovering a physical object that you can hold in your hand makes it a sensory experience that we don’t have as often in our digital world. Getting prints of the images is essentially creating that moment for your future self.
Beyond the benefits, here are some tips to remember as you embark on your own journey of building an archive:
Make a point to capture your surroundings, too—they provide context. Simply capturing your partner making a silly face doesn’t tell much of a story to future generations. Show them what you see. Get shots of the buildings in your hometown, the museum you visited in New York, the car you drove on a road trip. The world is constantly shifting so it’ll be nice to see how things change over time.
Write dates, locations, and names on the back. This seems tedious, but you can’t trust that you’ll always be around to tell people who/what is in the picture, and if you’re like me, you also can’t trust that you’ll always remember.
Bring a disposable camera on every trip you take. You don’t have to use the film all at once, though. Just capture what you want and save the rest for another trip. One camera can last a year, so by the time you get it developed, you’ve probably forgotten what’s on it, making it even more fun to look through them.
Save the digital version of the pictures as well. Most times, when you get pictures developed, you can get the digital images on a disc, too. Upload those to an external hard drive because you never want to house your archive in one place.
Is this expensive? Yes. Is it tedious? Yes. Does it mean you’ll have to look a little crazy while winding up your disposable before you take the picture? Absolutely. Whether you opt to use a disposable or not, just collect something. When it’s all said and done, remember that once the moment is gone, it may live in your memory forever, but that means it dies with you, too. Don’t take it all to the grave.
Printed images of my life in 2020.