Teru Kuwayama And The Future of Mobile Phone Photography

Teru Kuwayama @ 1197.is
(Teru Kuwayama at the 1197.is conference. Taken w/ an iPhone4 and filtered through the Camera Bag app)

A few weeks ago I volunteered to help run the 1197 conference. The topic was mobile phone photography and it’s evolution, technological advances, and social ramifications. Speakers included the Instagram Community Evangelist Jessica Zollman, and the creator of the first camera for your phone Philippe Kahn.

It is here that I first heard of and heard from Teru Kuwayama, a documentary war photographer and recent TED Fellow recipient. As I signed him in as a speaker for the conference I offered to take his bag to the back room. He laughed a little and handed me his bag which I promptly dropped. Teru travels like a Marine, and his ruck sack is no exception at half of his own body weight. Needless to say, I knew he’d have some interesting stories to tell during his presentation.

On stage, Teru touched on a few of the projects he’s been working on while embedded with the Marines in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iraq, and Pakistan. After years of documentary work with bulky camera equipment he decided to take his iPhone and a small collection of lightweight ‘toy’ camera (plastic models like the Holga) on his next assignment. What came back was a body of work that was easily edited on the fly and shared, via social media, with personally invested friends and family back home.

His subsequent online project, Basetrack, logged the military unit’s physical location, included blog entries about what was happening on the ground that day, and pictures of his daily experiences. This was a way for Teru to skirt the editors and censors of the mainstream media, and keep people informed of the war that he said has been all but forgotten by the major news publications.

Teru has been busy, and a short blog post does his work no justice. Basetrack is only one of his ongoing projects. Besides his actual photographs (I’m still blown away by his iPhone-ography) Teru has been researching ways for photographers to show their work outside of the mainstream media. Making sure that the public is able to stay close to conflicts that are of great interest to them, and shedding light on those that aren’t covered in the media at all, has been his new career focus.

I encourage you to read more about Teru, Basetrack, and a few other social media projects he’s working on. Check out the links below.

A short video of Teru introducing himself and his work after he was awarded a TED Global Fellowship.
A TED Blog about Basetrack
Three of his blog posts on Idea Lab for PBS.org
New York Times feature on his iPhone photography.