Photographer David Friedman recently unearthed a set of beautiful black-and-white photos of New York City that he had taken in 2000. The only difference between these shots and the stunning higher-resolution ones available on his professional website? He captured all of the former shots with his Game Boy Camera.
As he explains on his blog Ironic Sans: “Back in 2000, I was playing around with a Game Boy Camera, trying to use it to take colour photos. (I finally got that to work.) When I first got the camera, I took a walk through midtown taking pictures. I just came across the images and thought I’d share them here for posterity (scaled up to 200 for visibility on our fancy modern displays).”
By his description, it doesn’t sound like Friedman stuck with the idea of using a Game Boy to play the part of some next-gen Weegee. That’s too bad, since these images provide a great image of New York at a time that’s just old enough that it’s beginning to feel like history — something in need of documentation and retrospection. But I still love the idea presented here because of how simply yet eloquently it sums up what this type of photography can accomplish. When Kodak first released its unprecedentedly cheap and easy to use Brownie cameras in the early 20th century, it helped extend the reach of photography beyond the commercial and technical borders of the art world and let a whole new set of people capture the most fleeting images in a new way. Why not use one of the world’s most ubiquitous and successful mobile gaming devices to do that once again?
See the whole set below:
[via The Creators Project]
Comments
10 responses to “Game Boy Camera Makes For A Whole New Kind Of Street Photography”
Oh wow, that colour pictures thing is cool.
Yeah. Although personally I prefer the black and white ones. The colour stuff is impressive but looks cheap.
And the black and white ones don’t? 😛
The next step here is to rig up a system that splits the image three ways into three GB cameras so you can snap all three colours simultaneously. Actually if you could add in a fourth one then you could take the black and white snap too.
Then tape two of them together and we can have 3D too.
Actually I already started toying around with that idea >.>
Well I’ll just have to patent it first.
The real challenge is getting it to record video.
Stop motion? Not exactly but it’s a half way point.
@cj Certainly doable, but like the colour pictures not exactly feasible for real world use. Silly as it may sound :p Would most likely take a fair bit of hardware modification to do it, although thinking about it now you could probably just grab the live feed being displayed on the screen fairly easily, surely there must be some kind of capture device that can do continuous recording
That sleeping lady on the train is the kind of photo I would expect to find pinned to a serial killers wall