trafficcamphotobooth.com
trafficcamphotobooth.com is a Webby-winning interactive art project by Morry Kolman that lets people turn public traffic-camera images into unconventional selfies while drawing attention to the surveillance built into everyday city life.
What is trafficcamphotobooth.com?
Traffic Cam Photobooth began in August 2024 as a project by New York-based artist and creative technologist Morry Kolman. The concept is deliberately simple: instead of taking a selfie with your phone, you stand somewhere visible to a public traffic camera, open the website, and use the camera’s existing image feed to capture yourself.
The idea came from an assignment at the School for Poetic Computation, where Kolman was asked to make a picture without taking a conventional photograph. What started as an experiment quickly found a much larger audience.
In an April 2025 interview with Numlock, Kolman said the site had received about 400,000 visitors and produced roughly 800,000 photos. The project also won the 2025 Webby Award in the Websites and Mobile Sites “Weird” category.
That combination of playful interaction and a more serious point about surveillance is a big part of why the project spread so widely.
How does the traffic-camera selfie process work?
Traffic Cam Photobooth is mainly designed for use on a smartphone. You can allow the site to find a nearby supported camera using your device location, or browse the map yourself and choose one manually.
Once you select a camera, the site shows the image being published by that traffic-camera system. You then position yourself within the camera’s field of view and capture one of the available frames through the website.
The site does not take control of the physical camera or tell it when to photograph you. It simply works with images that the relevant traffic authority is already making available.
Timing can take some patience. According to the site’s own guidance, many camera feeds refresh about once every two seconds rather than behaving like continuous video. That means you may need to stay in position for a moment before you appear.
Traffic cameras are also mounted for monitoring roads, not for flattering portraits. People often appear small in the frame, so bright clothing, larger gestures, or posing with a group can make the result easier to spot.
Does trafficcamphotobooth.com track your location or save your photos?
One of the more interesting parts of the project is how little infrastructure it needs behind the scenes.
According to the project’s public GitHub repository, Traffic Cam Photobooth is built as a static website and does not depend on a conventional application server. The list of supported cameras is processed on the user’s own device, including the calculation used to find nearby cameras.
In practical terms, that means the site can use your location to identify the closest supported camera without needing to send those coordinates to Kolman’s own server.
Fast Company also reported after the project launched that Kolman said he was not saving users’ photos or tracking where individual images were taken. He did, however, keep aggregate statistics such as visitor counts and the total number of photos created.
There is still an important distinction to make. Your browser may ask for permission to access your location, and your device still has to retrieve images from whichever public camera provider supplies the feed. The privacy claim is more specific: the project itself was designed so that its nearby-camera search did not require sending your coordinates to a custom backend.
Is the site only for New York City?
No. New York City was the original focus, which is why much of the early coverage makes Traffic Cam Photobooth sound like a New York-only project.
When PetaPixel covered the site in August 2024, it reported that users could access more than 900 New York City traffic cameras through the project. That large network gave Kolman plenty of cameras to work with and helped establish the site’s identity.
The project later expanded beyond the city.
In his April 2025 Numlock interview, Kolman said Traffic Cam Photobooth included cameras in New York City as well as Maryland, Georgia, Minnesota, and one camera in Ireland. The project’s open-source repository also encourages contributors to add other cities when suitable public camera feeds are available.
That broader geographic scope is worth noting because descriptions of the site have not always kept up with its expansion.
Are these the same cameras that issue traffic tickets?
Not always, and in New York City the distinction matters.
NYC Department of Transportation traffic-management cameras are used to help monitor road conditions. According to NYC DOT, those cameras provide frequently refreshed live images, can be repositioned by traffic-management staff, and do not record footage.
Automated enforcement cameras serve a different purpose. Speed cameras and red-light cameras, for example, are designed to document possible traffic violations and may photograph vehicles or license plates as part of that process.
Traffic Cam Photobooth works with public traffic-camera feeds rather than treating every roadside camera as the same type of surveillance system.
Kolman still describes the project as anti-surveillance art because these cameras can capture people moving through public space even when their official purpose is traffic management. That is his artistic interpretation of the infrastructure, not evidence that every camera creates a permanent or searchable recording of everyone who passes through its view.
Why did NYC DOT send a cease-and-desist letter?
The project eventually attracted attention from the agency responsible for many of the cameras it used.
On November 6, 2024, the New York City Department of Transportation sent Kolman a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he remove parts of Traffic Cam Photobooth connected to the city’s traffic-camera feeds.
NYC DOT argued that the project was using its camera feeds without authorization, violated NYC.gov terms, and could encourage behavior that put pedestrians at risk.
Kolman challenged the suggestion that the project required users to stand in traffic. He also turned the dispute into another piece of the project: he held the cease-and-desist letter up to a traffic camera with a long pole so that the city’s own camera system photographed the document.
Traffic Cam Photobooth did not disappear after the dispute. As of October 2026, trafficcamphotobooth.com remains accessible, and Kolman’s portfolio continues to describe the project as ongoing.
Is trafficcamphotobooth.com safe and legal to use?
The simplest safety rule is also the most important one: getting a better photo is never a reason to step into moving traffic or ignore local laws.
Traffic Cam Photobooth requires users to agree that they will follow applicable traffic rules and avoid creating a foreseeable risk of harm. In most cases, that means finding a position on a sidewalk or another place where you are legally allowed to stand and checking whether the camera can see you from there.
The legal questions around the camera feeds themselves are more complicated.
NYC DOT’s developer information says people who want access to its camera data feed should contact the agency and enter into a data-sharing agreement. Its 2024 cease-and-desist letter argued that Traffic Cam Photobooth’s use of the feeds was unauthorized.
At the same time, the site has remained online. That does not amount to a court ruling or a definitive legal resolution, so it would be misleading to treat its continued availability as proof that every aspect of the project has been legally settled.
For ordinary users, the practical issue is much simpler: stay somewhere lawful and safe, do not interfere with traffic, and remember that individual camera feeds can move, disappear, or change without warning.
Why has Traffic Cam Photobooth attracted so much attention?
Traffic Cam Photobooth works because it takes something people usually ignore and makes it personal.
Most discussions about public-camera networks happen through policy reports, privacy debates, or technical explanations. Those can be important, but they also make surveillance feel abstract. This project turns the same infrastructure into something you can interact with in a few minutes.
The resulting images are often grainy, distant, oddly framed, and nothing like a normal phone selfie. That visual awkwardness is part of the appeal. At the same time, the experience reminds users that the camera was already looking at the street before they decided to turn it into a photobooth.
That tension gives trafficcamphotobooth.com more substance than a typical novelty website. It can be funny without being meaningless, and critical of surveillance without requiring users to read an essay before they understand the point.
Its large early audience, 2025 Webby win, open-source design, expansion beyond New York, and public dispute with NYC DOT have all helped keep the project visible. More importantly, it offers a memorable way to notice a piece of urban infrastructure that most people walk past every day without giving it much thought.