Community Cameras Catch Frozen Seconds

By Lori Kurtzman

The camera was still there. He couldn’t believe it. Tied to a piece of twine looped to a newspaper box on High Street, that little disposable relic of film photography had made it through the night, intact. No one had stolen it.

But they had taken something.

Alex Walkowski pulled a pair of scissors from his bag and snipped the twine. He held that plastic case like a treasure. He had no idea what pictures lay inside.

“It’s like a time capsule,” he said.

For more than a week now, Walkowski has been leaving disposable cameras throughout Columbus, encouraging those who find them to snap a picture. The 20-year-old Clintonville native, about to be a junior studying journalism at the University of North Carolina, came up with his crowd-sourcing photo project somewhere along that stretch of highway headed to school.

Walkowski wanted to reflect something about people and their surroundings and their differences and the way they all know just what to do when a camera appears. He wanted people to pause. He wanted to share those quiet, frozen instants.

He called his project Momentary Comfort.

“Once a camera comes out, everybody knows instinctively to stop what they’re doing,” he said. “ Whatever their real emotions — smile, act like everything’s OK.”

He found packs of disposable cameras dirt cheap online and tracked down a single drugstore that would charge him $6 to process film, something no one seemingly did anymore. He tied some cameras to park benches in North Carolina. He left one on the street during a trip to Portland, Maine.

One camera disappeared. Another seemed doomed, nearly cracked in half and soaking wet. But he started getting images: confused dogs, smiling strangers, peace signs flashed to the sky. He had pictures of sneakers and pale, muscular legs. In North Carolina, an older couple took a photo of their hands intertwined. In Portland, a man stuck out a wide, blue tongue.

“Conclusion of this camera?” Walkowski wrote on the Momentary Comfort website about the pictures from Portland. “Some people understand cameras. Others have no clue what to do with them.”

He brought more cameras during a visit to Columbus this month and moved them around, hoping people would pick them up in Clintonville’s Park of Roses, outside the Columbus College of Art & Design and at the Main Library. He put one outside the Short North shop Tigertree.

All of Walkowski’s cameras say the same thing, in a message taped to the back: “Welcome to the community camera! Take a picture and leave it for someone else to do the same.”

The camera outside Tigertree vanished. Walkowski made a “missing” poster, but he shrugged off the loss. “You don’t know what’s on it until you develop it,” he said. “I didn’t really know what I was missing.” Someone took a camera that he tied to a bench in Clintonville, too.

But he did manage to salvage a few pictures from two Columbus cameras: hazy images of tree branches, a finger covering a lens, a woman holding a young girl. One man posed crouched on the arm of a park bench, gun-hands pointing toward the camera. A bespectacled man took a selfie in which he looked like he had just smelled something bad.

For now, while he’s back in Chapel Hill, Walkowski has cameras indoors in three Short North businesses — Tigertree, Glean and One Line Coffee. A fourth, assuming it’s still there, is outside, hidden inside a sign near the Gateway Film Center.

“It’s awesome,” said Gateway’s director of business development, Wolf Starr, whom Walkowski considers a mentor. “It’s like our prodigal son is coming home to do something cool.”

One of the Momentary Comfort cameras will sit inside Dawn McCombs’ handmade goods shop, Glean, on N. High Street. McCombs is so fascinated by the project, by the way it touches art, culture, sociology and community, that she’s agreed to help out on the Columbus end while Walkowski is at school.

She’s curious to see where Walkowksi takes the project, and where it takes him. She said she’s long sensed some kind of special energy in this kid and the way he looks at the world.

“One of these days,” she told him, “I’m going to read about you.”