I grew up in the ’90s. Romania was a wild place, and slowly (but surely) we started gaining access to Western technology.
We used to take photos on film. Family photos. Thirty-six shots on a 35mm roll. Then you took the roll to a lab, had it developed and printed on paper. You ended up with thirty-six individual images, each telling a story of its own. And you had to explain those stories-to friends, to family. What was happening in each frame.
It was (and sometimes still is) about being able to tell a story behind a photo.
When I started photographing graffiti, after a brief while, film became too expensive for that time and age. In 2004, my parents got me my first digital camera-a second-hand Canon IXUS 430. According to what I later found online, its sensor was rated for around 400-500 thousand shots. I burned through it in less than three years.
I shot everything. Everywhere. On a 4GB card. Downloaded to my computer, burned onto CDs. I shot no video as quality was too poor to make any sense.
Then came the age of abundance. Cheaper cameras. Bigger sensors. More features. Larger cards. More storage. I kept the same pace and went through my next camera as well – a brand new Canon G12. It lasted about three years before something (too) deep inside it gave up.
After digging through my archive HDDs, I realised that in less then 10 years (2002-2011) I had accumulated over three and a half million images. I shot everything and everywhere. And even now, more than twenty years later, opening random folders still brings back fragments of those moments. Bits and pieces.
Then phone cameras arrived. Better UX. Less friction. More flexibility. Fewer chances of error-one of my biggest failures back then was arriving next to the subway car only to realise I’d forgotten the memory card while shooting graffiti.
But something plateaued. It felt less physical and I was less drawn to taking photos. Pull out the phone. Open the camera. Click. Never look at the images again.
