Photographer Billy Hunt thought he had found a way to hack his portrait subjects' awkwardness: a scream-activated photo booth.
“I’ve done a lot of portrait work and you can see the war in these people’s brains when you try to take their picture,” says Hunt. “People always want to present themselves in a certain way and they make it worse. Much much worse.”
Avoiding this war is easier said than done, however. What he's found is that screaming just raises the stakes. As a photographer myself, I like to think I could be the kind of candid subject I’m always looking for, but even with the Scream-o-Tron 3000, my instinct toward vanity still kicked in. (My portrait is the last in the gallery above.)
It’s a trend that Hunt has been noticing and is now rolling with. He says people’s vanity, even in their screams, is revealing and allows us to see the struggle of self-perception.
“I think it’s even better,” he says. “The truth is always more weird and interesting than what I would imagine.”
Hunt's device consists of a microphone threaded through a boom box, which wirelessly fires a camera through a PocketWizard. The technology for the project is Hunt’s brainchild, but the actual engineering was done by a local camera shop in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Hunt is based. He took a large karaoke boom box into Pro Camera and they rigged it so that that when the levels from the input line (where the microphone is connected) senses a certain decibel of noise it puts out a little electric message that triggers a pocket wizard.
By forcing people to stand in front of the camera and take a minute to not only think about their presentation, but also open themselves up, Hunt says he hopes the Scream-o-Tron 3000 portraits can take us back to a time when a picture was not such a fleeting thing.
“100 years ago you got maybe got one picture taken your entire life and you had to sit still for a full minute to get it,” he says. “Now it’s just uploading cell phone pictures to Instagram instantly. I think there is a big need for a different kind of portraiture today. People want images of themselves but they don’t want some cookie cutter idealized notion of themselves."
To capture the process we all go through in order to “perform” for the camera, Hunt has also started recording slow-motion video that starts rolling before we even open our mouths.
“It’s fascinating to see people build to peak action and then do something different,” he says. “Often times the [intensity] falls off and they are all of a sudden embarrassed or they run. They want to get out the frame as fast as possible.”
From here, Hunt says he hopes to maybe take the show on the road for an extended period of time. He’s already taken it a few places across the country, and the enthusiasm is always consistent.
“I could set it up at galleries. It would be fun to do it campgrounds, Walmart parking lots,” he says. “I just want to make it an experience and allow people to start trying to move beyond their forebrain and into their amygdala, toward their primal emotions.”
