Locks on Toilets
For the past five years or so (with variable amounts of passion – usually low-level, when-I-can-be-bothered; recently, now that I have an iPhone 3GS which has a decent camera, more often), I’ve been doing an odd little photography projects titled ‘Locks on Toilets’. What is it? Well, it does precisely what it says on the tin: It’s a relatively large collection of photographs of devices that lock the toilet door so nobody can barge in on you while you’re attending to your business.
It’s an odd little project, which I came up with when I was hideously drunk one night – like all great ideas, in other words, and I just sort of continued doing it. Of course, it’s a lot more fun if it’s a collaborative project, so I hereby invite you to join in the slightly odd fun…
So, what is this all about?
I could spin you a line about how the one thing that all humans have in common is the need to relieve themselves, and how that’s a beautiful thing. Of course, it’d be a complete load of shite (if you’ll forgive my contextually-appropriate french). Thing is, I don’t have any idea why I’m running this project – I just know I’m having fun doing something that’s so completely and utterly pointless that it becomes awesome.
Show me some examples!
Well of course I will:
Train
Boeing 777 somewhere over Russia
Locked with a padlock!
London Paddington
Portmellon, Cornwall
The no-lock lock in a pub in Bath
Puzzlewood in Forest of Dean
How can I get involved?
First off, you may wish to join the Locks on Toilets group on Flickr – there’s currently nearly 200 entries there, but there’s always space for more! In the group, look at some of the submissions, and submit your own if you fancy it. The group will accept any and all submissions, but it’s cool if you, in the title, add the name and place of the establishment, and it’s cooler than a penguin’s plums if you also geo-tag the photos, so I can eventually do a mash-up plotting all the photos on a map.
Now, I can totally understand if you can’t be bothered using your main pride-and-joy flickr account to do this – I don’t do that either. My main account on Flickr – Photocritic – I keep for stuff I’m actually proud of in some capacity, and I use my alternate account – isharq for stuff which I’m not too fussed about, including this account, so if you fancy it, you can set up a second account.
Alternatively, feel free to use my alternate account to upload your images – you can do that automatically by e-mailing photographs to lot@kamps.org (‘LOT’ of course being short for Locks on Toilets). What’ll happen when you send pictures there, is that they’ll be added to a queue for approval (just so you don’t end up posting any porn in my name – that’d be embarrassing), and every now and again I’ll sweep through to tag and publish them to the flickr stream and the LoT Flickr group. The way I do it is that I’ve got that e-mail address saved as a contact on my iPhone, and whenever I take a photo, I just e-mail it off right away.
Go on, it’s all just a bit of fun!
Tell me about your nutty projects
Have you got any crazy ideas / projects / things you do when you think photography is in danger of getting just a little bit too serious? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear about ‘em!
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Insights, suggestions and comments
LOL.. That’s one of the most bizarre project I’ve ever seen :)
Kudos on the original idea :)
That is fun. I remember going to an exhibition of a Swedish (I think..) photographer who had this project with slides, he called some of them “killer slides” as they were all destined to children but a lot of them were rusty and torn. It was quit interesting to study this phenomenon at his gallery.
wonderful :)
I started taking pictures of writings on the walls of one single girl’s toilette in a library. you wouldn’t believe the stuff people write. quite cute, actually :)
Never did anything this wild on my own hook, but did contribute a lock from the University last year.
My personal favorite is “somewhere over Russia.”
Wow, that’s nice, it just reminded me that for some time I’ve been making pictures to the number 29 anywhere I could find it.
Your 29 project is fabulous! :) THank you for sharing!
We actually did a project in grad school of bathroom graffiti. I wish I still had that project online somewhere!
This is an odd collection indeed. I’ll have to remember to help add to it!
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