This Camera Automatically Writes Poems About Its Photos

Cameras hold a very interesting place in our culture, as they’re tools used both for objective recordings of reality and deeply subjective interpretations of the human experience. A photo may be cold, lifeless documentation or it can be pure art. In the latter case, it is often the photo’s job to tell a story and the right words can enhance that story. To streamline that process and create a new form of art in its own right, Elías Sarquis constructed the Cámara Poética that automatically generates poems to accompany captured photos.

In her reporting about this project for Raspberry Pi, Ashley Whittaker points out that this may be the original poetry camera. She’s referencing the fact that others have completed similar projects, including the Poetry Camera made by Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather. But Sarquis completed his project way back in 2018, which means that it may be the first of its kind.

After each snap, the Cámara Poética turns the new photo into what Sarquis calls “poetographies.” Those include the images, plus a short poem related to the visual content. Cámara Poética is able to write those poems by using Google Cloud Vision to generate written descriptions of the scenes in the photos. It then passes those descriptions to a Markov chain algorithm that chops them up and reforms them to fit a poetic structure. Recently, Sarquis switched to ChatGPT to perform the same functions.

On the hardware side, the Cámara Poética contains a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ paired with a camera module (originally 5MP, then 8MP). Those fit inside a clear enclosure, which a big tactile shutter button on top and a speaker on the front.

Unlike with the Poetry Camera, which spits out poems printed on receipt paper, the Cámara Poética provides a digital experience. The user can choose to post the poetographies on Instagram (as Sarquis does) or anywhere else. But Sarquis did develop an interesting way to display the photos with a device called Visor Poetográfico.

Visor Poetográfico consists of a 15” LCD screen connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W, covered with a translucent curtain. It automatically displays any photo captured by the Cámara Poética, forcing the photographer to carefully consider each shutter release.