About
Memory Card is a photo journal that documents my social life through the honest, slightly broken look of my old Casio digital camera.
13 10 2026What I'm trying to do
I want a space for self-expression and for looking, slowly, at how people live, socialise and connect with each other. Not a highlight reel. A journal. The photos are of my friends, the places we end up, the parts of an evening that nobody usually bothers to photograph because they aren't "post-worthy".
Underneath that, there are a few smaller goals:
- Capture moments without a phone. This is the central one.
- Show that there's an alternative to documenting your life through a phone screen.
- Build a portfolio of my own, one entry at a time.
- Invite other young people to express themselves the same way. See the Sunday series for how to send photos in.
The no-phone idea
Most people my age document everything with a phone: quick photos, edited, planned, taken with Instagram already in mind. There are unwritten standards. The image has to be perfect and the proof that it's good arrives as likes.
Somewhere in that habit the spontaneity disappears. The moment stops being a moment and becomes a shoot. And when someone takes out a phone in a group, something between the people in that group goes quiet for a second.
So the rule for this journal is simple. When I go out, the phone stays home or stays in the bag, switched off. The Casio comes along. It has a small screen I can barely see in daylight, no filters, no instant upload. I can't check how a photo turned out, so I stop trying to. I take the picture and go back to the conversation.
The phone would have taken the perfect photo. That is exactly why I didn't use it.
Why it looks like this
The photos come straight off the memory card. Grain, flash, the orange date stamp burned into the corner, the 4:3 frame. I keep all of it. Perfection is cheap now. Grain, for once, is the honest option.
This blog is built the same way. Plain pages, no feed, no infinite scroll. It loads fast on a bad connection and it doesn't ask anything from you. It's the slow space, opposite to the fast one.
Who this is for
People between roughly 16 and 30 who grew up online, who feel the pull of Y2K nostalgia or the idea of an "imperfect" social media, and anyone around photography who wants to see what a night looks like when nobody is performing it.
If that's you, you're welcome here. If you also own a half-dead digital camera from 2006, even better.
Who I follow for this
- Amisha Nair, whose personal blog reads like a raw journal of a photographer making her way through the industry and life.
- Mădălina Grosu, a friend who posts her life through the film cameras she owns and keeps nudging me to do the same.
- Kyle McDougall, a documentary and landscape photographer in Canada who also shares creative work on YouTube.
The project, plainly
Memory Card is a university project for a documentary-photography module, running over one semester with a target of ten published entries. All of it is shot on equipment I already own. No budget, no new gear, which is also the point.