Social Media Inspired Mobile Camera Phone Walk Throughout Europe

Photos by Wanda Luesst
Story by Wanda Luesst and Nyc Labrets

The snapshot lives forever.

But starting with the very first Pre-Historical Cave Paintings, to when the art of modern photography first began, the act of creating an immortal snapshot, going from the click of the shutter, to hearing the delighted 'oohs' and 'ahhs' from viewers, was a time consuming and laborious process.

A process that used to take not only days, weeks and months, but even longer than forever.

Then the technology, gradually at first, in small steps, improved and shortened that time frame.

First came Kodak's Brownie camera that put the ability to quickly share images with one another in everyone's hands.

But that still took a while.

A long while.

Then came the revolutionary Polaroid camera, which turned what used to take days into mere minutes.

Now something entirely new has emerged.

In just the past 3 years, the unheralded rise, in all of Human History, of Social Networks, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, has radically enabled our ability to share information throughout the planet, in the blink of an eye.

Not in weeks, days or minutes, but in nano-seconds.

It has not only become epidemically viral, it has also become a world wide passion for millions upon millions of people

An unexpected side benefit has been that non-professional, non 'Experts' are really, really good at it, showing unexpected skills in creativity and in their capability to catch a moment on camera in an instant and share it just as quickly.

Not just from their computers, but on the go, on their camera enabled cell phones.

What is also unique is that anything, and there is no telling what that might be, might catch their eye and end up in a captured image that millions of people can see, right away.

Competition comes into as well. Friends might find themselves in a friendly rivalry using their phone-cams to do combat with each other to see who can take the better picture or it may it be in the satisfaction one gets in being the first one to post their pictures to a world-wide audience.

This past Saturday, the 12th of June, 2010, a Mobile City Walk that highlighted many aspects of this phenomenon took place in many German speaking cities of Europe:

Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Paderborn, Chemnitz, Munich, Graz and Zürich were among the participating cities that day.

These Mobile City Walk took place along a marked route in the city, with a city group leader and they lasted for about two hours.

The rules that each group followed were not rigid, but mirrored the technology, and were essentially free-flowing.

Other than participants needed to be over 18 years old, anyone could participate who owns a mobile phone, was signed up to the local city's Flickr group, and that the photos were to be posted by Sunday, 24 hours later, the main rule was 'Anything Goes.'

Members didn't have to stay together, or focus on one set topic, other than to explore mobile life in the city, as seen through the eye of their cameras..

The City Mobile Walk ended, at least in the city of Munich with a group meeting to be given the chance to share impressions and maybe getting to know each other better.

The contest part of it was that the best shot of that certain city, plus the best shot of the day, would be selected by online vote, the winner getting a prize for this.

The leaders, Stephan Rescher and Pia Kleine Wieskamp, of the group in Munich thought it lucky that the weather was so great- in Zürich it was reported that the rain in that city kind of spoiled it for the participants.

In Munich one of the stops on the route was to see and document the work of an artist who working on his project, a spray painted picture on canvas, which had to get done by that evening, a fun and colorful subject to document in real time.

On a much different note the Munich group also came across Police, Rescue Worker and Firemen who were working on finding a missing man that had fallen into the Isar River the previous day.

SEE MY VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE CHANNEL WANDA LUESST documenting this walk through in Munich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKaKjB1dHXA

To learn more about this, and to see the results of these European City Mobile Walks, they can be seen on a variety of websites throughout the Web.

Here is a partial list of them:

Website:
http://mobilecitywalk.de
http://www.flickr.com/groups/mobilecitywalk2010/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobilecitywalk/
http://twitter.com/MobileCityWalk
http://mobilecitywalk.typepad.com