For our fifth Applied Experiment, artist and creative technologist Kaloyan Kolev reframes the act of taking a picture: slowing photography down to a single deliberate frame.

What if a camera asked you to slow down?

Our smartphones capture endless frames, burst after burst, and mostly forgotten. Photography inherently can enable an increased presence, mindfulness and awareness. But today's oversaturated always-on version has the opposite effect.

Hence reFrame is a digital camera and e-ink photo frame in one, capable of capturing and displaying one photo at a time.

Featuring a color ePaper display with six pigments, reFrame renders each photo dithered: somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. Without a viewfinder, and with the e-paper rendering photos with a delay, the camera changes the photography experience: unexpected elements become more pronounced, and the actual frame is only revealed after the fact.

After you press the shutter, each photo takes 15 seconds to fully appear, the display using electrical charges to physically move ink particles into place. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid. With ePaper, the photo stays on screen even after powering off. The only way to clear it is to take a new photo.

We had four professional photographers try it out:

Olya Oleinic

Photographer based between Amsterdam and Paris with selected exhibitions across Foam Photography Museum, Red Hook Labs Brooklyn NYC, Unseen Amsterdam, and more. See more of her work here.

Denisse Ariana Pérez

Creative director, copywriter, author, and photographer based in Barcelona, with work featured by Dazed, It’s Nice That, The Guardian, Fotografiska New York/Stockholm/Berlin/Tallinn, London Art Fair, and more. See more of her work here.

Marco Galloway

Scottish Photographer based in New York, focussing on his own fine-art practice while having shot for Vogue, Interview Magazine, T Magazine, Wallpaper, USM and more. See more of his work here.

Douglas Eveleigh

Photographer from Massachusetts, based in Athens, who has shot for Athens Kallithea FC, Ogust Design Studio, Pullman Club, nu-look magazine, K Studio Architecture and more. See more of his work here.

A chance to re-engage with photography's psychological potential.

reFrame travels on as chain letter — follow via are.na or build your own

Related Research

APOSSIBLE is interested in how Photography was once an act of attention: choosing a frame meant truly looking at the world. But as the camera became ambient, capturing replaced seeing. We now photograph in order to defer looking, outsourcing our memory and presence to the camera roll.

reFrame asks two things of us: first, to slow down and become attentive before pressing the shutter, and second, to live with a single image long enough to actually see it.

Where most digital cameras optimize for more — more frames, more resolution, more speed — reFrame explores what becomes possible when a camera gives you less. One frame, revealed slowly, that stays with you.

For more theoretical and practical references, explore all of reFrame's connections below.