Forget your selfie sticks and leave the work to the city’s transport department.
New Yorkers can now create their own personal photo booths using the DOT’s traffic cameras, turning surveillance footage into unique snapshots of themselves with a view of the Big Apple in the background.
TrafficCamPhotoBooth.com, a website created by Morry Kolman of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, launched Monday, offering residents real-time access to more than 900 of the city’s traffic cameras by connecting users to DOT streams readily available on its own site.
Users can choose between a Polaroid or photo booth strip format, find the nearest traffic camera, strike a pose and say “Cheese!” – then press a button icon to snap the eye-catching photo.
“What I love about this project is that people love getting something, especially something about themselves,” Kolman, 28, told The Post.
“Giving people the opportunity to take selfies of themselves through these traffic cameras, I think, is a really interesting and fun way to raise awareness about the major surveillance apparatus in New York City, in a way that’s fun and kind of lighthearted, and people want to engage with it because they get something out of it,” the inventor said.
Three days after launching the site, Kolman had received 3,880 visits to his website and taken 918 photos.
What makes a good traffic camera photo? Wearing bright clothing, posing with large groups – and, most importantly, looking left and right before crossing the street, Kolman said.
“Stop traffic with your looks, not your body,” the website advises.
Traffic camera models should also hold their poses for a few seconds so that the cameras can take a picture.
Kolman, a Bronx High School of Science graduate who goes by “WTTDOTM” online, came up with the idea for the Traffic Camera Photo Booth on his own while taking an art class called “Imperfect Pictures” at the School for Poetic Computation.
“The prompt that inspired this one in particular is, ‘Take a photo without taking it.’ The idea was to find a way to take a photo without being the one ‘pressing the shutter,'” Kolman said.
The first iteration of the project took a few hours to create and a week and a half to create the final product, leading some users to ask why he didn’t create an app.
“Making an app sucks and costs money and I have to pay Apple,” Kolman explained. “I think this (website) is one of my many contributions to interesting places on the internet that are doing things that are just independent, free, interesting and hopefully have some impact on the world.”
Kolman said New York City is the perfect setting for the project because traffic there moves at intersections, while traffic in many other cities moves on freeways.
“People can walk into intersections, but I’m not going to encourage them to walk onto (freeways) and try to take a selfie that way, am I?” Kolman said. “That makes the traffic cameras, at least in New York, pretty accessible for photos.”
Traffic cameras in New York City are also hosted via URLs and the image at the URL is updated every 2 seconds, Kolman said.
“I don’t have to do any work behind the scenes,” he said.
Kolman has already received numerous requests to expand the project to other cities. He is excited to solve this problem and has his eye on Atlanta or Salt Lake City as the next step in the project.
Currently, the project exists on the open source platform GitHub and is accessible to anyone who wants to take the initiative and implement it in their city.
This is not Kolman’s first project that brought him recognition. He and co-founder Alex Petros created an online conceptual art project called We Are Internet.
The pair gained attention with two projects: “Are You The Asshole?” – a project about AI bias that went viral with 200,000 users within two days – and “Deface,” about data surveillance.
Kolman doesn’t have access to the photos taken by the traffic cameras, but hopes users will start tagging him so he can see what people are doing on his site.
“I am not informed of what camera they are using, so I cannot capture any of the images they do,” Kolman said.
The creator is convinced that the website could exist forever, since Kolman only had to pay about $10 for the domain to create the website.
