Photographer David Friedman recently unearthed a set of beautiful black-and-white photos of New York City that he had taken in 2000. The only difference between these shots and the stunning higher-resolution ones available on his professional website? He captured all of the former shots with his Game Boy Camera.
As he explains on his blog Ironic Sans: "Back in 2000, I was playing around with a Game Boy Camera, trying to use it to take color photos. (I finally got that to work.) When I first got the camera, I took a walk through midtown taking pictures. I just came across the images and thought I'd share them here for posterity (scaled up to 200% for visibility on our fancy modern displays)."
By his description, it doesn't sound like Friedman stuck with the idea of using a Game Boy to play the part of some next-gen Weegee. That's too bad, since these images provide a great image of New York at a time that's just old enough that it's beginning to feel like history—something in need of documentation and retrospection. But I still love the idea presented here because of how simply yet eloquently it sums up what this type of photography can accomplish. When Kodak first released its unprecedentedly cheap and easy to use Brownie cameras in the early 20th century, it helped extend the reach of photography beyond the commercial and technical borders of the art world and let a whole new set of people capture the most fleeting images in a new way. Why not use one of the world's most ubiquitous and successful mobile gaming devices to do that once again?
See the whole set below:
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