This Saturday, WorthlessStudios, currently located on Knickerbocker Avenue, will hand out 100 rolls of free film to anyone who shows up as part of the final run of its “FREE FILM: NYC” project. Carlos De La Sancha, who runs the project, says he hopes the project will attract photographers who live in the neighborhood.
“I want you to show me how you, as a local photographer, live in this space,” Carlos De La Sancha told me. “What are the important spaces? How do you inhabit this neighborhood?”
Sancha will be there on Saturday to kick the project off and give away rolls from the studio’s airstream trailer-turned-darkroom that sits at 7 Knickerbocker Avenue. They’ll start handing these out at noon and plan to continue until they run out.
Sancha says he has one request for people who take the studio up on the offer: to use the film to shoot within “One Square Mile” of the darkroom’s East Williamsburg address. The studio plans to give out maps to everyone who picks a roll up.
“You build on your community like this,” says Rain Roberts, a local photographer who was recently named the studio’s “Photographer in Residence.” In support of the project, Roberts says: “You include others you, you share.”
Oftentimes, it can feel like photographers enter a foreign space, take photos from their outside perspective, and then leave. The one-mile idea behind the “FREE FILM: NYC” projects tries to makes the case for each neighborhood to have the opportunity to document itself.
While shooting within a mile of his pickup spot is one of the requests Carlos is making, being a professional photographer is not. De La Sancha recalls a time during a Harlem iteration of FREE FILM: NYC, when he ran to a hardware store and bought new batteries for a woman who told him she hadn’t used her old, still-working film camera in years.
“It’s really nice to see the people who have done it at some point come back,” he told me.
After receiving their roll, photographers can either develop the film themselves or return them to the studio by way of a 24/7 drop-off box, before March 17, where the studio will then develop the photos in its own darkroom, in exchange for keeping ownership of the images, which they plan to use to populate books the studio sells for about $40 a pop, and also plans to showcase in a studio show. According to Sancha, photographers can also request that the studio send mail them back their negatives.
Starting as a popup on Canal Street in 2018, the project has grown into a variety of iterations every year.
In 2019, WorthlessStudios brought the “FREE FILM” idea around the country, traveling around in the mobile Airstream-darkroom. During the height of Covid-19 and the George Floyd protests in 2020, the studio started shipping rolls of film to different states, giving participants the prompt of “Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division.” In 2022, the “FREE FILM: NYC” concept started, and the group distributed their 100 rolls over in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Previous iterations of this project have documented Red Hook, the Lower East Side, Harlem, the South Bronx, and Sunset Park. For its final year, “FREE FILM: NYC” is now in East Williamsburg.
“We decided to have East Williamsburg as the last neighborhood [for this project] because that is where we are based, and it is a good way to show people what we do and the space that will host the exhibition this summer, when we have collected and edited all the images from the six different neighborhoods,” says Sancha.
While situated on Knickerbocker, the studio also plans to have Roberts host free workshops in dealing with analog film.
“In my work I think about the body as shape that conforms—or doesn’t—to the shape of the environment,” Roberts told me. “For this project with ‘FREE FILM NYC,’ I’m looking to Bushwick as the environment, and the communities here as [the] shape.”
WorthlessStudios is located in the lot on 7 Knickerbocker Avenue and will be giving away rolls of film starting at 12pm on February 17th.
Top photo taken by taken by Katey St John.
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