From New Year’s Eve 2012 to New Year’s Day 2013, Facebook users uploaded 1.1 billion photos. Which is something absurd like two photos per active user. But don’t think that people haven’t always been people. Even before smartphones and digital cameras, consumers were out there taking a lot of stupid photos just for fun. And given how relatively resource intensive it was for people to own cameras, buy film, and develop photos it’s pretty amazing to see how many prints came out of “the old days.” Enter The Photo Man.
Mark Kologi has processed over three million photos as part of a business where he buys and sells abandoned personal prints. Family vacations, new cars, dilapidated buildings, anything people shot on film he’ll collect and distribute. He says that people react to the photos differently. Some buy them because they’re looking for artistic or aesthetic inspiration. Others just think they’re cool. And Kologi says that about one person a year comes up to his stand and starts crying because they’re so struck with the history of it all. Or something. Ben Kitnick’s short documentary is a great way of realizing that digital photography didn’t create a new impulse in us, it only expanded on one that was already there. [PetaPixel]