As Elastik Mobile was building up its iPhone photography browsing platform in the autumn of 2009, we got in touch with the people behind Photomonth, a month-long exhibition of photography in East London. We discussed the possibility of making them an app that year but sadly didn’t have the technology in place in time and we decided to get back in touch in 2010.

The year went past and we did indeed get back in touch and there were a few conversations about how we could best work together. We quickly ruled out a simple app to let people find the different events and galleries as a bit dull and settled on the idea of a photography competition.

Photomonth itself is all about professional photographers showing their work but we wanted to do something to let visitors to the festival feel more connected to the event. We would encourage visitors to the festival to submit their best mobile phone photos to the competition and our favourites would be shown in the exhibition.

We designed and built a perspex display case to house an iPhone hooked up to a physical button. This case was mounted on a stand and installed in Leon in Spitalfields, East London in the heart of the festival. The phone was running a custom application I wrote which displayed photos that people submitted to the competition and the button allowed visitors to browse through the images at their own speed. They could also rotate the case to rotate the photo in the screen.

The event was really good fun and we had loads of great submissions which can be found in the Flickr group for the competition and the hand-picked, weekly galleries.