If you feel like you’re being spied on, look up! In this big metropolis, thousands of cameras are watching you, with the key to a souvenir photo.
In this big city, there are 900 surveillance cameras that scan the streets, capturing the faces of passers-by. Initially designed to monitor traffic, they are now used to immortalize urban “selfies”. Explanations.
The streets are teeming with people, traffic lights are flashing, cars are stopping and starting. But above this urban ballet, cameras, more than 900 in total, don’t miss a thing. Discreet but omnipresent, they follow the flow of vehicles and pedestrians, recording every movement. What few people know is that today, these cameras play another role: they take pictures of passers-by, offering a very particular version of the selfie. An idea born from a school project that has since taken on an unexpected dimension.
It all begins with an academic task, seemingly innocuous, entrusted to Morry Kolman, a student at the School for Poetic Computation. The challenge: take a photo without pressing the shutter. Rather than resorting to traditional means, Morry Kolman turns to traffic cameras. These, although designed to monitor cars and regulate traffic, become in his hands new cameras, capturing snapshots of urban daily life.
The concept is simple, but ingenious: it creates a website, trafficcamphotobooth.comwhich allows anyone to access the video feeds from these cameras, updated every two seconds. By positioning themselves correctly in front of one of them, passers-by can take a photo of themselves, transforming a surveillance tool into an improvised photo booth.
In just over a day, the site is up and running. In a few weeks, it attracts thousands of visitors. More than 10,000 photos have already been taken, each one immortalizing a unique moment in the city. The site offers several presentation options, from the classic Polaroid to the photo booth strip, but it does not store any data, thus guaranteeing a certain discretion despite the intrusive nature of the cameras. The city in question? New York, of course.
