Charlie Blumberg


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Carnegie Mellon Design graduate, specializing in graphic design and photography, seeking to elevate brand experiences and consumer expectations.

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Carnegie Mellon University Lost Photo Collections

A digital platform that catalogs and presents discarded student photographs, transforming them into an accessible record of CMU’s photo department.


Interact with the project here.

Over the past several years, hundreds of photos have been left behind by students in Carnegie Mellon University’s darkrooms. There, they sit sealed in bins until they are inevitably thrown away. Due to the intense nature of CMU’s photography program, a lot of these photos end up coming out quite well. However, I’ve found that when students decide they’re not invested in the medium, they end up abandoning a lot of their work. I thought it was a shame that there’s this constantly evolving, beautiful body of work that’s simply collecting dust in some drawer. I wanted to create an easily accessable means for people to peruse these photos, and allow past students to view what is or has happened in the Carnegie Mellon photo department.

Thus, I created the Carnegie Mellon Lost Photo Collections. Everyday, we go through the hundreds of abandoned photos in Carnegie Mellon’s darkrooms, select several to scan, then post them on the website. Past batches of scans are cataloged and can be viewed as well. Using the arrow keys, the site allows you to shuffle through beautifully scanned images from anonymous artists. This project preserves and celebrates the overlooked artistry of Carnegie Mellon’s darkrooms, transforming forgotten photos into a shared, accessible archive of creativity.

Project Details:
Skills: Graphic Design, Web Design, UI/UX Design
Tools: Figma
Date: Fall 2024












Problem Significance

Through the preservation of forgotten prints, the project exposes how systems of value shape what we remember and what we discard.


The Carnegie Mellon Lost Photo Collections confronts the problem of how creative output, even when skillfully produced, is often discarded and overlooked once its immediate value has passed. Unlike traditional archives or galleries that preserve carefully selected works, this project emphasizes the creative debris that accumulates in the margins of artistic practice. By rescuing and presenting abandoned darkroom prints, the archive highlights how much artistry is lost when work is treated as disposable and challenges the assumption that only curated or celebrated works deserve preservation. The project positions forgotten photographs not as failures or waste, but as part of a larger, collective portrait of artistic experimentation within the university.





This reframing connects to a broader tradition of artistic inquiry into systems of value and preservation, echoing works such as Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis’ installation The Museum Collects Itself. Their project revealed the unseen by treating trash generated by the gallery as material worthy of exhibition, uncovering patterns and narratives hidden in what is usually discarded. Similarly, the Lost Photo Collections transforms overlooked prints into an evolving gallery that documents the hidden life of the darkroom, making visible the flow of creative labor that would otherwise disappear. By focusing on what is left behind rather than what is chosen, the project creates a more organic and inclusive way of remembering, while also questioning how archives shape collective memory and artistic legacy.



Creating the Identity

 When developing my initial sketches for the site, I approached the design with a narrow mindset that limited how the photographs could be presented. I assumed the images needed to sit on a white background in order to mimic the look of a gallery space. I also believed they should be displayed as small thumbnails within a grid to emphasize the sheer volume of photos collected over the years. On top of this, I felt pressured to align the design closely with Carnegie Mellon’s branding, under the assumption that the archive should visually reinforce its connection to the university. As I reflected on the project’s values and objectives, however, I began to recognize these as misconceptions that ultimately constrained the potential of the archive.






Switching the background from white to black changed the tone of the site immediately. While it moved away from mimicking a traditional gallery wall, it gave the photographs a more sophisticated presence that better matched the level of polish fine art photographers and collectors expect. I replaced Carnegie Mellon’s signature red with a transparent purple, which better fit the themes of age, abandonment, and melancholy driving the project. I also abandoned the grid structure in favor of an “iPod Nano” style layout, where one photo sits in the center and the others stack behind it. This structure kept the photographs themselves at the center of attention, which was the most important goal. It also emulated how I would sort through the photos in real life, where I would have a messy, spread out stack, and shuffle through them and create more piles to organize them.






After restructuring the layout a little further, it was time to begin prototyping the interaction. I not only wanted to create a scrollable gallery interaction, but I also wanted to include a way to sort the photographs by photo type. To achieve this, I created stacks of photos based on different subjects, animated them to create a shuffling motion, then turned each of the stacks into components. Those components were then tied to a dropdown menu showing the photo categories.

 


After presenting my progress to some trusted peers, I was given some great insight on the direction of the project. We discussed how the categorization idea ran counter to the artistic messaging of the site, and that the experience should emulate the act that initially drew me to creating the site in the first place, that being the intruige of finding beauty in a bin of randomness that others have disregarded as being worthless. This is when I transitioned the categorization system to a date sorting system. With this, I ran with a different positioning for the site that I felt was truer to my intentions. I would present the site as a collective that every week, would scan through the massive Carnegie Mellon abandoned photo collections, and present chosen work. With this final framing, the site took on the role of a living archive rather than a rigid database. The interaction became less about categorizing and more about surfacing work in a way that mirrored the randomness and discovery of digging through the darkroom bins. By focusing on date-based curation and weekly updates, the project found a balance between structure and spontaneity, giving the archive a rhythm that felt natural and true to its source.






Impact

 The project was well received by Carnegie Mellon’s photography department, who recognized its value as both a preservation effort and a thoughtful extension of the student darkroom experience into a digital medium. For me, the process was equally impactful as it pushed my technical abilities with Figma. I learned to prototype layered interactions, animate complex image stacks, and design modular components that could simulate the logic of a functioning archive. These skills gave me a stronger command of interaction design within Figma and prepared me to translate conceptual design goals into polished, testable systems. In combining archival intent with digital execution, the project demonstrated how design can reframe forgotten material into an accessible, lasting, and celebrated body of work.




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