Descriptive Camera - Matt Richardson, Creative Technologist. The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene.
However, instead of producing an image, this prototype uses crowd sourcing to output a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of "parsable" metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content. Memory of a Memory. Dossier Journal » In Conversation with Michael David Murphy. “This is a picture I did not take of the most optimistic homeless man in America, spare changing at the Fox News-sponsored ‘Tea Party’ in Atlanta on April 15, rattling his empty cup as hundreds passed-by and grimaced at the sight of him approaching, trying to avoid meeting his smiling face, clenching their car keys and homemade signs about Taxes, about how the government is taking too much of their money, while a man stands in front of them with an empty cup and full smile, saying ‘there’s no good crowd or bad crowd — we’re all one, baby’ while they hustle past as fast as they can, to catch a glimpse of their hero Sean Hannity, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with hands over their hearts while singing God Bless America.” – Michael David Murphy Since 2004, writer and photographer Michael David Murphy has recorded non-fictional descriptions of everyday life as part of his online side-project, Unphotographable.
I spoke to Murphy recently about his word and camera-based photography. Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers' Essays.