curate: The 100

The 100 is a project that will (eventually) feature 100 people, from the ages of 1 to 100, and the photographs they take over the course of a week. The project was originally simply meant to be these 100 people, who would by supplied a disposable camera, asked to document a week in their lives. The photos would/will be so different, yet many would/will have similar themes.
I found out about the project through Photojojo, along with hundreds and hundreds of people. Suddenly, the The 100 people were faced with a major overload of interest (requests crashed their site!), and I think they were kind of at a loss for what to do. So they continued to choose their people, and invited all the rest of us to participate in The 100 Week, October 1-7, in which those of us who didn't get picked by can still buy a disposable camera for ourselves, can still participate.
I really liked the idea of using a disposable camera. The way they explained it, "We’re asking that everyone uses disposable cameras to level the playing field – its not about the latest hardware, editing, tagging, filters and real-time sharing, but rather a slower, perhaps more considered reflection upon yourself. You don’t need to worry about aperture, exposure, focus. You just need to think about what you’d like to capture." The truth is, photography has changed so much in the last 10 years, we forget how precious these memories need to be. We document everything in our lives now, we see the photos instantly, and then we delete them, or we move on. Having film makes something more permanent. And it's not that permanency, that paper, that makes the difference, because that's still ephemera. It's still kind of disposable. I feel like maybe it's the wait that makes is more permanent. The fact that I had to take all 27 photos, and go somewhere, drop them off, and WORK for it, that's what makes these permanent.
The thing I disliked about this is most of these photos were awful. My camera flashed EVERY time I used it, I couldn't deactivate it, and I couldn't see if things were in focus or not, so a lot of time, they weren't. Additionally, CVS kinda screwed me, as there were 25 viable photographs on the index sheet, and they only printed 19 of them. When I saw some were missing on the paper prints, I was like, oh well, they'll be on the CD. But they weren't there either. So now the work that I admired in the process is frustrating because I will have to go back, and be all "whiny-customer" and ask for them to please print me this, this, and this off the negatives, because I can see they're real pictures, they're on the index, but you didn't give them to me and I want my pictures. Grrr....