To Make Better Photos, You’ve Got to Throw Them Away

Among all the new online magazines, blogs and outlets devoted to photography, Dispose sticks out like a cheap flash at a birthday party. It’s a webzine that publishes — you guessed it — only photographs made with disposable cameras.

Each issue of Dispose features photographs made in a single day by four contributors. No more, no less. The simple premise serves up raw, imperfect and intimate images. The 12 issues published thus far display the creativity the restrictions inspire.

“By using disposable film cameras with a limited amount of 27 exposures, and not allowing any post-production editing, we hope to force a shift back to the art of image-making,” say Dispose co-founders Bruno Levy, Arpana Ramamajhi and Alex Hollender jointly via email, preferring to answer our questions as a group.

Dispose’s contributors — who include weed dealers, musicians, friends, famous photographers, designers and human rights activists, among others — must scrutinize the moments they capture differently than if shooting digitally. Most of the decision-making begins and ends at the moment a contributor presses the button. Levy and company are not editors; they are publishers. Dispose is simply a conduit for the contributors. This state of affairs is partly down to practical decisions about money.

“The process of creating even a small amount of high quality original content is labor intensive, time consuming, and above all, expensive,” say its founders. They wanted to have a global perspective but didn’t have the funds to do it in a traditional way. So instead “the subjects of our stories also act as the authors,” they say.

Compared to SD cards which contain thousands of images, Dispose preaches that throwaway cameras allow a slower and more mindful approach to photography.

“The process of image-making has shifted mainly to post-production image editing,” explains Dispose. “This means we are less aware in the moment that we are taking and capturing the image. We become distanced from the object and events we are photographing.”

In an attempt to get closer, Dispose looks for contributors with “unique individual narratives or perspectives that may otherwise be unknown.” In that sense, Dispose is about the interplay of images and stories.

“We contextualize images within stories, which gives them importance and meaning,” says Dispose. “We are not aiming to be a formal photography magazine, focused only on the quality of each and every image we publish. Visual narratives are more interesting to us than either visuals or narratives on their own.”

Subverting the formal formula further, disposable cameras enforce a limited amount of manipulation (no F-Stops) and the resulting lo-fi aesthetic is a great equalizer.

“We certainly cherish the unique qualities of film grain and the softness the disposable camera’s plastic lens gives to images. However, our primary reason for using disposable cameras is to level the playing field for all of our contributors,” say Levy and company.

In that spirit, Dispose is always on the lookout for new contributors and welcomes you to contribute or recommend a buddy with an essential eye. Who knows, you might find yourself next to a world-famous photographer? Alec Soth’s photographs were in the most recent issue, and Dispose plans to grow their concept to include reaching out to guest curators and “previously inaccessible” big name contributors.