ten:15 – shape+colour

The web has allowed a whole new medium of collaborative photography to flourish. Artists teaming together is obviously nothing new, but the ease and instance of the interwebs make it totally free-flow for strangers around the world to shed their own little bit of creative light together onto one project.

I’ve noticed that lots of these collabs have found a way to focus on something universal and immutable: time. Our locations and cultures and languages are all different, but it’s always going to be 10:15 am everywhere and that’s not changing anytime soon. Similar to Craig Geffen’s awesome Humanclock, which collects photos from around the world visualizing every minute of every day, ten:15 wants you to send in a picture of whatever you happen to be doing at 10:15 am no matter where you are in the world.

There’s something about the communal collection of our banalities that make them become completely fascinating. Having photographic proof that some dude in Manila is putting cream in his morning coffee somehow creates a little more balance and order in the universe. While I was there, I noticed that a frequent collaborator to ten:15 is Michael Surtees, the man behind the lovely “New York City Colour Project”.

Uploaders can create their own user portfolio and the site and link it back to their personal site, making it a great way to search for new photographers or just to voyeuristically photo-creep on other people’s lives. You can search the archives by photographer, date, or location. There’s something about the casual nature of the photographs, that sort of laid back moment where someone picked up their camera or phone at 10:15 and just snapped, that creates some really beautiful shots – with an inherent spontaneity that can’t really be faked: