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Photo technology has come a long way since disposable cameras like the Kodak Fun Saver were ubiquitous (hello peak 1990s), but Portland photographer and filmmaker Corbin C has not come along with it. He has been shooting his whole life with various styles of cameras, but disposables have been his medium of choice for a decade.
“I love using these things,” he says. “It just feels right for me.”
Corbin C, who is in his mid-30s, has shot about 21,000 photos on disposable cameras since the spring of 2014. A new book called Choice Cuts (Buckman Publishing, 170 pages, $20), which hit shelves Sept. 22, compiles the best of Corbin’s archive. The tome is not only an homage to a bygone technology, but a time capsule of the underground Portland music scene from 2015-2023, among other Portland events during that period.
Here’s Spoon Benders playing the dance studio Vitalidad in 2021 and Fabi Reyna at Dig a Pony (now Lollipop Shoppe) in 2022. And there are the George Floyd protests of 2020, the 2017 Women’s March and, sure, a cat convention at the airport Holiday Inn. Choice Cuts contains more house shows and obscure bands than most people know ever existed at makeshift basement and backyard venues. That was part of the appeal of documenting the scene, Corbin C writes in a caption in the book.
“Maybe these people are still playing music, on stage or maybe just at home, or not at all. But I couldn’t say! Maybe this was their only tour, the only chance Portland ever got to see them…I like having the pictures because it’s proof that it happened, it’s at least some evidence that, for a moment, this was real.”
The limitations of the disposable camera medium meant that Corbin had no zoom, no settings and once the clicky wheel advanced to the last frame, no more film. He took one photo per person in the band, and that’s it. “There are no second chances,” he says.
Corbin likes the look of the resulting photos—the hot flash, the low resolution, even the red eyes—in part because they match the grittiness of the scene he was capturing, he says.
“It has a warmth that we miss in the photography we have these days.”
