MPB Meets: Nintendo Game Boy Photographer Jean-Jacques Calbayrac

While digital cameras are released with ever-increasing resolution, it’s intriguing to see a photographer go back to the absolute basics. With an output stripped of the fine detail we've become accustomed to, Jean-Jacques Calbayrac uses a Nintendo Game Boy with Game Boy Camera—which came out in 1998 and has a sensor size of just 128-by-128 pixels—to allude to rather than describe. We interviewed Jean-Jacques on how he got started with the Game Boy Camera, his creative process, and why he thinks his images appeal to people.

MPB: What came first for you—portable gaming or photography?

JJC: Even though I deeply love photography, the Game Boy fell into my hands way earlier. I was four or five when I first had a Game Boy. And it wasn’t even mine, it was my sister's. I remember she saved money for months to be able to buy it, and—in the end—I was the one hogging it most of the time. I think I had my first camera when I was 13 or 14. It was something like the Kodak EasyShare CX4230, so not a great camera for today's standard. But back then, for my age, it was decent!

MPB: Did you have a Game Boy Camera as a child or did you discover it as an adult?

JJC: I didn't have one as a child, but I discovered it back then. I remember trying it at a friend's house, and I was just wowed by the fact that the Game Boy could do something like this! And I still am today. I rediscovered it about ten years ago when I was walking by a flea market in Paris. I was studying photography at the time and I loved alternative processes, like the Polaroid or wet plate. The Game Boy Camera is not an alternative process per se, because it's just a digital camera, but its limitations are so extreme that I had to try it again. Also, I bought it for 2€, so I wasn’t really losing much there!

MPB: In a time when resolution and megapixels are so important in the industry, why do you think there is such an appeal to your work?

JJC: I think my work resonates with people on many different levels. One of them is nostalgia, a majority of my followers are around my age and I guess we all grew up with a Game Boy-like device. Seeing pictures like mine takes you back to that time when you were playing old-school games and there is something comforting about it, so I guess my pictures are comforting for people which is a nice feeling! 

But also my pictures don't look like pictures, it has this weird mix between traditional and modern technology, like a crossover between George Seurat and Cyberpunk. This makes you question the artwork, from its conception side but also from what it tries to depict. This process makes the viewer on the picture, a relationship begins between the two. To me this is key. I want people to be slightly puzzled, at first sight, and then they will find their own way to see my picture.

MPB: Can you tell us about the camera itself?

JJC: The Game Boy Camera is a two-bit camera, meaning that it can only display four colors natively. In this case—black, white, and two kinds of grey. That's one of its main limitations. It also holds a very tiny sensor of 128-by-128 pixels, which is another important limitation because that's where we get the file size and therefore the pixel ratio the Game Boy Camera is so known for. The actual picture we get from the camera is 160x144px, but that’s counting the little Nintendo frame it adds to the picture. If you remove it, you end up with a 128-by-112-pixel image, which gives us 14,336 pixels per picture.

MPB: You’ve experimented a little with color—how do you colour the images?

JJC: Doing colour photography with the Game Boy Camera is like time travelling because it takes you back to the origin of colour photography. Currently, a color picture is made up of multiple layers. If you take one of your pictures in Photoshop, you will be able to see in the ‘channels’ tab that your picture will be made of a red, blue, and green layer. Well, that's all we need to make a color picture. 

To achieve this, I strap my Game Boy on a tripod and I take four pictures. One classic to start, then three each with a filter in front of the lens. A red filter, then a blue filter, and a green filter to end it. You will still get black-and-white pictures, but you will see that the filters modify the values of each picture. Now, take all of that in Photoshop or similar software. Take the first picture you took—it is going to be our base for the rest. We want to look at the ‘channels’ tab now, and for each channel, we will want to bring in its counterpart. So we open the picture taken with a red filter, copy it then paste it into the red channel. It will overwrite the red channel for the base picture. Now do the same for the blue and green filter picture, and enjoy. You should now be the proud owner of a ‘hand-made’ color picture! Note that this technique works with any kind of photography, not just the Game Boy Camera pictures.

MPB: Do you shoot at all with a ‘conventional’ camera?

JJC: It depends on what you mean by the conventional camera, but yes. I even have too many cameras—if there is such a thing. Besides the Game Boy Camera, I mostly use film cameras, funnily enough, and all kinds of formats. Leica M6, Hasselblad 500C/M, Linhof Technika IV, Deardorff 8x10, two Polaroid SX70 and a Polaroid SLR 680. And, the latest addition to the family, is a beautiful and very special Hasselblad X-Pan, which my wife gifted to me on our wedding day.

MPB: Being digital technology, what are the possibilities in terms of hacking/modding the interface?  Are there any possibilities in terms of how to stretch the technology?

JJC: The camera is very limited, but not because Nintendo nerfed it, I think they tried to do the best they could with what they had and they did something amazing with it. Now, to answer the question, it is not possible to hack the Game Boy Camera or make any changes to the software because the hardware is set up to be a read-only memory, meaning we can not make any changes to the software. But I've discussed with people in the community trying to change that. People might have seen initiatives of creators making a lens mount adapter, to be able to mount your sweet Canon or Sony lens on your Game Boy Camera. Some even went as far as mounting a Game Boy to a telescope and taking pictures of the moon—it's pretty amazing. It's not the use I want to get from my camera, but I love seeing people pushing the boundaries and trying things differently. It's very inspiring. One of the great places to get more info about this is the Game Boy Camera Club on Discord.

MPB: Your website, gameboycameraman.com allows users to take images with their laptop/phone cameras. Can you tell us more about this?

JJC: One thing I've been very aware of is that people are very curious about the Game Boy Camera, but not many have used it. And for good reasons—you need the console first, and then you need the camera. These days, consoles from the 80s and 90s start to be a bit pricey and—surprisingly enough—the camera as well. So, if it's just to have fun for five minutes, I guess it's not really worth it. But most people have a smartphone with a camera. So I wanted to make something for my followers, to give them a chance to experience something they've never done before. The app itself is only running Javascript, and I wrote the whole code myself. To achieve this, I had to implement and use a number of different image manipulation and scaling algorithms such as ‘ordered dithering’ and ‘nearest neighbor’ to emulate the output of the device. These are things that I've never done before and were challenging, but at the same time fascinating and fun! So far, people have been loving it, sharing pictures online and my app has already traveled to more countries than myself!

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