The Guardian

London

It’s not everyday you can participate in a groundbreaking techno-cultural event and show the world your hidden creative side. Not everyday you can pass off blurry photos of, say, your unmade bed or the rubbish you see on the way to work as avant garde art. But if you have a cameraphone, you can do all this and more, by contributing to Sent, an exhibition of “cameraphone art”, due to open online and at the SixSpace Gallery in Los Angeles.

The show will have two strands, explains co-curator Xeni Jardin who co-edits the leading techno-culture blog BoingBoing. Established artists and photographers will show cameraphone shots, displayed as prints in the gallery, but Sent will also feature images from public.

Anyone interested can contribute via the exhibition website, Jardin explains. During the exhibition, work sent by the public will appear on flat screen plasma displays. “Images will refresh at a given rate, so you will constantly see a randomly selected batch of images from the public, some of which may be contributed in real time. We’re going to keep the contribution process open throughout the event.”

Sent comes at an opportune moment. The media only had eyes for the iPod this Christmas. But other gadgets also had a good festive season. According to Carphone Warehouse’s managing director of retail, Jonathan Hook, cameraphones started to become more mass-market entertainment. “In the build-up to Christmas, over 90 per cent of the phones we were selling on subscription were cameraphones. On the pre-pay side, we had cameraphones for under pounds sterling 100. It was the first time they had been at that price point and it was a key driver of volume sales.”

Data released last month indicates that 2003 was a good year for the gadget, both in the US and Europe. Research firm Canalys also reported that 4.9m cameraphones shipped in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the third quarter of last year — 27 per cent more than the previous quarter. The total for the year is expected to be 16m. Canalys predicts that figure will double in 2004.

One sign of increasing popularity is growing media panic about cameraphones, surveillance and personal privacy. Last month the business consultancy Meta advised companies not to buy the gadgets for corporate use, suggesting they could be used to leak important intelligence or generate potentially embarrassing images.

Last year saw a steady stream of press stories about the new technology being banned by companies, gyms, galleries and schools, both in Europe and the US. The media has also focused on so-called cameraphone crimes — in particular “upskirting” (using them to take voyeuristic snaps of women on the street) and “digital shoplifting” which uses the gadget to surreptitiously snap images from magazines and books to share with friends.

“Concerns about privacy are more important as time goes on,” says Jardin. “With this, we have a surveillance technology in the hands of everyone. All of a sudden, everyone is big brother.” That can bring benign effects as well as problems. Take the widely reported story of Sam Gedeon, a Swedish grocer who scared off the man holding up his store by snapping him with his phone. It will take a while to see what changes camera-phones bring about, says Jardin.

So does Sent offer any clues about future developments? Images sent so far show that cameraphones “spark a heightened aesthetic awareness of one’s everyday environment,” says Jardin. “People don’t carry digital cameras with them all day. And even if they do, a digital camera can’t capture, share and publish images.” Consequently, the images they take are of things people wouldn’t normally photograph (or previously would not have been able to capture).