Sum of its Parts

What happens if you document an event through the lens of open-ended prompts, human error and unreliable technology?

Sum of its Parts uses the structure of a photo scavenge hunt to create an unpredictable document of a public event.

In its first iteration, two disposable cameras were released into the crowd at San Francisco’s Dyke March in June 2019. Each camera was attached to a self-addressed stamped mailer with a pencil, instructions, and a series of prompts or “photo captions” generated by me. Each person picked a prompt, snapped a picture related to that prompt, wrote the shot number next to the prompt, and passed the camera on to someone else. When the roll was full, the last person was to seal up the envelope and drop it all in a mailbox. One camera disappeared, never to be seen again; one camera made its way back to me through the mail about two months later, revealing a fabulous day of Pride and a quieter document of a queer camping trip. I heard it lived under a tree for awhile, and then between some sofa cushions.

In two subsequent iterations, I placed the camera with attached prompts and pencil in a central “station” at a public event. People took the camera, snapped a picture related to a prompt, wrote down the shot number next to the prompt and returned the camera to its “station”.

The shot numbers on the outside dial of the camera are a bit hard to interpret and do not exactly correspond with the shot numbers on the negatives. So, sometimes different people assigned the same shot number to different prompts, and wrote down shot numbers that exceeded the length of the roll. So the final correlation of “photo captions” to images is a speculative endeavor.