The World’s Best Disposable Camera

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Remember the days when a disposable camera meant a holiday or celebration is right around the corner, 24 photos that will decide how you reminisce a lifetime later.

The strange, beautiful magic of something called disposable creating something that lives with you forever. Pinned on the fridge, framed on your desk, or stuffed into a shoebox, these memories are anything but disposable. Imperfect, blurry images that somehow captured our perfectly imperfect lives.

For those of us who can remember queuing to collect an envelope that contained the only evidence of the weekend before, here’s a little reminder of that quiet anticipation. Carrying it home, trying not to peek so you could share the moment around the kitchen table with your loved ones. Re-living the bits you’d already forgotten, crying with laughter as the camera insisted on using flash for every shot — turning everyone into ghostly, washed-out creatures with red eyes and blurry limbs.

Nostalgia — is an affectionate feeling you have for the past. This is one of mine.

I can’t say I’ve used a traditional disposable camera in the last twenty years. I’ve seen them at weddings and parties as novelty icebreakers. Confused young faces, little ones puzzled by the lack of a screen, wondering how to turn it on. The disposable camera — once a way to remember — now thrown in the bin before the roll is even finished.

The irony is that today, the world’s best disposable camera is the one we carry every day. The one in our pockets. The camera that captures every moment of our lives, but mostly captures nothing at all. The tables have turned: we don’t have disposable cameras any more, we take disposable photos. Pictures that can be deleted as quickly as they were taken, each one quietly fighting for survival when that dreaded notification appears: “Storage full.”

Now you have to prioritise your memories. Which occasions survive the photo-apocalypse? What goes first — the thirty near-identical shots posing with your dog, the endless screenshots of bucket-list “must visit” locations, or the accidental pocket photos? Once, 24 images were all we needed. Now 24GB isn’t enough.

Funny how the disposable camera never really disappeared — we just stopped throwing away the camera and started throwing away the photos. Most of those not-so-disposable photos ended up in the same place: quietly working away on the fridge door — but that’s a story for the next post.