The film in these single-use plastic cameras expired well before the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, the film expired before the New York Times endorsed both Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren for President at the same time, before the Paris Climate Accord, before Donald Trump attacked Barney Frank’s “protruding” nipples on Twitter, before Twitter itself, before the first iPhone, before televised “shock and awe” bombings kicked off the Iraq War, before the original The Fast and the Furious film, and before the Y2K panic. The film expired in 1999.
Manufactured in China, with film produced in Italy, this model of cheap, disposable camera was stocked in Sunoco Gas Stations across the United States, likely targeting consumer audiences of road tripping families, teens en route to impromptu field keggers, and adventurous Gen X couples.
In July 2020, as the United States was entering month four of Covid-19 lockdowns, Thomas C Bradley mailed forty artists one expired film camera apiece, accompanied by simple instructions and a self-addressed, stamped envelope for return. During a year of learning to reconsider expectations and control, this project had an appropriately “Jesus, take the wheel” type of beat.
None of the resultant photos exhibited here were altered, and no shots were cropped or omitted (unless requested by the artist). Each roll of film was processed in Portland, Oregon at a third-party facility, more than twenty years beyond their expiration dates. Several rolls showed expected aging and distress: light leaks and chemical leaks, broken flashes, dead and corrosive batteries. Many of the cameras misfired, exposing only a few frames per roll. Other rolls developed entirely blank. Some cameras were never returned at all.
As the first months of the pandemic continued to unfold, broadly preventable economic and social crises introduced the sobering reality that no one with political power had any type of plan (those with extractive economic power, however, clearly did). Institutional abandonment added fuel to the unprecedented, historic civilian rebellions following the police murder of George Floyd—one of so many Black Americans executed every year by extrajudicial state violence. Summer 2020 became a veritable powder keg, made no less explosive by an upcoming, patently cynical United States Presidential election. Boomers fell down QAnon rabbit holes on Facebook, millennials cannibalized one another on Twitter, and zoomers got (understandably) more blackpilled. Social distancing, by definition, divides people up. But the specific labor class division the pandemic has clarified feels particularly dystopian: some people can work safely from home, and it’s everyone else’s job to serve them.
We are bearing witness, it seems, to the inevitable entropy of empire.
The Flash Camera Project offered artists a literal lens to document disruptive times. But would any of these artists—who, just like everyone else, were likely managing multiple, relentless crises—really want to spend their limited time cataloguing this sinking ship? And if they did, what if none of the film even worked?
What resulted, fascinatingly, in spite of all this trauma, is almost anti-apocalyptic. You might call it radically hopeful. Throughout the photographs, there emerge simultaneous tendencies towards affectionate tenderness—lovers and friends embracing, pet portraits, road trips, and beach days—and absolute, collective tenacity—mutual-aid, murals, and street uprisings. Without ever consulting one another, these artists collectively, perhaps instinctively, pried aesthetic revelations out of entropy. Technically, this project should have failed. But even under duress, artists are alchemists, turning proverbial shit into gold.
— Sean J Patrick Carney, May 2021
