Forget the selfie stick and let your city’s transportation department take care of it.
Using DOT traffic cameras, New Yorkers can now create their own photo booth by taking unique snapshots of themselves from security camera footage with New York city views as a backdrop.
TrafficCamPhotoBooth.com, a website created by Molly Coleman of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, launched Monday to give local residents real-time access to the city’s more than 900 traffic cameras by linking users to a stream readily available on the DOT site.
Users can choose from Polaroid or photo booth strip formats, find the nearest traffic camera, strike a pose, say “Cheese!” and hit the button icon to take the daring photo.
“What I especially love about this project is that people love to be given something, especially something about themselves,” Colman, 28, told The Washington Post.
“We thought giving people the opportunity to take selfies through these traffic cameras would be a really interesting and fun way to raise awareness of the mass surveillance apparatus around New York City — in a fun and light-hearted way, where people want to get involved because they get something out of it,” the creators said.
Three days after the site went live, Colman confirmed that 3,880 people had visited the site and taken 918 photos.
How do you take a good photo with a traffic camera? Wear brightly colored clothing, pose in a large group, and most importantly, look both ways before crossing the street, Colman says.
“Stop traffic with your appearance, not your body,” the website advises.
Traffic camera models must hold a pose for several seconds at a time so the camera can take a photo.
Colman, a Bronx High School of Science graduate who goes by the name “WTTDOTM” online, independently invented the traffic camera photo booth while taking an art class called “Imperfect Drawings” at the School of Poetic Computation.
“The theme that inspired this piece was ‘taking a photograph without taking a photograph’ – the idea was to find a way to take a photograph without pressing the shutter,” Colman said.
The first iteration of the project took a few hours to build, and the final product took a week and a half. Some users asked, why not just build an app?
“It’s hard to make an app, it’s expensive, and you have to pay Apple,” Colman explains. “I see this website as one of my many contributions to interesting places online — places that are independent, free, interesting, and hopefully have some impact on the world.”
Colman said New York City was the perfect backdrop for the project because traffic occurs at intersections, whereas traffic in many other cities occurs on freeways.
“You can go to the intersection, but we’re not going to encourage you to go out onto the highway and take a selfie,” Colman said. “It’s just that, at least in New York, the traffic cameras are pretty tolerant of taking pictures.”
New York City traffic cameras are also hosted via URLs, and images at the URLs are updated every two seconds, Colman said.
“There’s no behind-the-scenes work to be done,” he said.
Colman has already received numerous requests to expand the project to other cities, and he’s excited to solve that problem, with Atlanta or Salt Lake City on his sights as the next step for the project.
At the moment, the project exists on the open-source platform GitHub and is accessible to anyone who wants to take the initiative and implement it in their own city.
This isn’t the first project that Kollman has gained recognition for: he and co-founder Alex Petros created an online conceptual art project called “We Are Internet.”
The two have attracted attention with two projects: “Are You The Asshole?”, a project about AI bias that gained 200,000 users in two days, and “Deface”, a project about data surveillance.
Colman said he doesn’t have access to photos taken by traffic cameras, but he hopes that by allowing users to tag themselves, his website will give him an idea of what people are doing.
“We don’t know what cameras they’re using, so we can’t get the same images as them,” Colman said.
Its creator believes the website can last forever, because the only cost Kolman incurred in creating the site was the approximately $10 he paid for the domain.
