Camera tossing
David Rowan
Wondering how to use the over complicated new digital camera that Santa brought you for Christmas? Simple. Stand in the street at night, set the shutter to open for around a second, and then toss your camera high into the air. You may never be able to use it again, of course, but hey – at least you'll be participating in the most fashionable craze to hit digital photography for some time.
Over the past few months, professional and amateur photographers around the world have embraced the hobby of "camera tossing" as the hottest trend in digital imaging. By spinning a camera in the air – and, ideally, catching it afterwards – practitioners are surprising themselves with the abstract patterns of light serendipitously captured on their memory cards. Think of the ornate geometric patterns that can be drawn with a Spirograph toy: colourful, hypnotic and strangely compelling. At their best, the results can be beautifully calming. But don’t just rely on these two lines of words to convince you: go marvel at the examples displayed at cameratoss.blogspot.com.
This is a blog maintained by Ryan Gallagher, a 28-year-old theatrical lighting specialist from Texas who kick-started the trend last August. Unable to sleep one night, Gallagher took his low-grade digital camera and experimented by waving it at some city lights while set to a long exposure. So intrigued was he with the results that he decided to display them on Flickr, a popular online image-sharing community owned by Yahoo. Flickr makes it easy to "tag" publicly viewable images with keywords so that anyone can chance upon them when searching for those words. As others joined in, there were soon more than 5,000 "cameratoss"-tagged images, and, by the start of this month, 956 Flickr members had signed up to Gallagher’s group (flickr.com/groups/cameratoss) to debate the aesthetics of in-flight snaps. Perhaps more would have joined had American practitioners not taken to calling themselves "tossers", but then British slang does not always translate.
"Part of the addiction comes from the fact that the results are always a surprise," Gallagher explains. "Each picture is like opening a little black box into a world we cannot see." Some participants have been experimenting with daytime tosses, indoor tosses, even self-portraiture from the air. Gallagher does, however, offer newcomers a warning: "You will drop your camera eventually. Lady Luck, fate and physics are the primary photographer… And sometimes they want to break things."
But... is it art? Some in the camera-tossing community are excitedly comparing the results with abstract expressionism; others suggest the "generative art" based on genetic code or computer algorithms. So what does Graham Wood, this magazine’s award-winning director of photography, make of it?
"These people need to get a life," says an unimpressed Wood, admittedly a man who still refuses to hold a camera that does not contain film. "I’ll grant that there’s a fleeting charm to these images. Sadly, I imagine a few will end up on gallery walls."
In fact, galleries in Hamburg and Berlin are already negotiating to exhibit Gallagher’s images. Some day, even Times photographers may start throwing their gear in the air. Just don’t expect the director of photography to reimburse the repair expenses.
david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk
