Not just in imagery but in photo philosophy.
(click on thumbnails for full-size images)
It doesn’t matter if you are a well-compensated professional shooter or the guy at the 3-year-old’s birthday party at 
Chuckie
Cheese’s who ends up holding the camera; you are chasing the elusive
“great” photo. In this age of “megapixel” this, “RAW format” that and
Nikon, Epson or Canon blah, blah, blah that has recently managed to make
being a photographer, sometimes less about the act of photography and
more about the act of swiping your credit card for more smart cards, I
find myself perched on the cusp of obsolescence. Oh, don’t get your
panties wadded; I, too, have a digital camera, I even use PhotoShop to
make a living…but my creativity is nestled warmly in a time warp. I use
film (believe it or not many still do), but more importantly, I load
film into cheaply-made black boxes of plastic, affectionately referred
to by the few of us in the know, as simply…toy cameras. Photo box toys
with plastic parts and pieces made and manufactured for children. Most
of these where never loaded with film, more likely than not, just hung
around gangly necks, clicked with reckless abandonment in the pantomime
of documenting games of cowboys and Indians, moms at the kitchen sink
and dads sleeping in the Barcalounger. My arsenal is made up of
rinky-dink cameras with funny feminine names like Diana, Banier, Holga,
or names that sound like infamous never-produced cars of the future,
Arrow, Mark L and Fujipet. My arsenal is crap. My crap makes my “art.”
So why now, when it is easier than ever to get a nice photograph and cheaper and simpler to print your own, have I 
became
a near-Luddite photographically speaking? It’s an easy answer: I like
the work I make with toy cameras more than anything I’ve done in the
past 23 years of photohobbying. With toycameras, I am forced to think
more about the shot, less about the camera’s controls, more about what I
want the photo to “say,” less about the technical fluffery of so-called
“good” photography. Any respected photographer will sing the same song,
“It’s not the camera or the equipment that makes a good photo, it’s the
person behind the camera…” Toy cameras push this notion beyond just
words. I am convinced that toy cameras cannot make a bad photograph
good, but they can make a good photograph great or a
“throwaway” moment a “decisive” one. “How?” Many ask. “So what, the
composition is iffy, there’s blur, vignetting and piss-poor contrast,
your bad photograph is not art just because of the camera’s poor
execution!” This many times from the same group of photographers who
measure horizon lines, cloud puffiness and sharpness at 1200% to deem a
photograph’s merit as opposed to the emotion contained with the
boundaries of the image…to each his own. That ain’t how I’m rolling…
So
how am I rolling? How do I work? I guess that is the point of these
words, not to sell you on the idea of $15 cameras and outdated film as
art tools…but now that I’ve brought up $15 cameras and outdated film,
I’ll start there. The cheapest way to dip a proverbial toe into toy
camera photography is to grab a Holga. The Holga, despite the
improvements made to its design in the past year, is made roughly the
same way it has been since 1982 when T.M. Lee and Universal Electronics
introduced the 120SF. I have two Holgas, one of them with modifications I
made myself, and one souped-up model I won from Holgamods.com in this
year’s World Toy Camera Day competition. Holgas are great. Here’s the
quick thumbnail in a nutshell about them. They use 120mm film. The body
and lens are both plastic. Out of the box you are led to believe there
are 2 apertures. There is only one. The lens says f/8. It’s more likely
at about f/13 or so. Holgas don’t really leak light that much, contrary
to what you hear. It is more likely that you will loose the camera back
because of the cheap clips securing it than it is that light might seep
in at the edges; but that said, there are no real guarantees yours won’t
leak. Light does definitely 
bounce
around a bit inside and can enter through the film counter. I use tape
and Velcro to hold on the back, and I made a flap to cover the film
counter that I raise up to check when I am advancing the film. This is
all tech mumbo-jumbo. Most of this applies whether you are using a Holga
or picking up an antiquated toy like a Diana camera or one of its many
clones. There are many great resources on the web for information on
these plastic gems and their intricacies, along with modifications to
make them “better.” Check www.ToyCamera.com
to start. Of course, as you might guess, eBay has no shortage of Holga
and Diana listings for interested shoppers. Enough of that... back to my
mention of outdated film. You can pick up outdated film at almost any
real camera store or film processing lab or again, at Ebay… on the
cheap, usually 50% off at a minimum. Your camera won’t check the date;
trust me, you’ll be fine.
Okay,
back to me: here’s some of my dimestore philosophy on shooting with
dimestore equipment. Everyday I see images shot in foreign lands, of
impoverished individuals and scenic wonders that I’ll probably never
witness in person. I love many of these images captured by weary
traveling photographers and photojournalists, but I have chosen to make
my work more about what is directly in my life that moves me daily,
hourly or if I am really lucky, at the very moment of the shutter’s
click. For me to do this effectively, I keep a couple toy cameras in my
work bag I wrangle back and forth every day. Usually loaded with black
and white film is a Diana clone and my Holga. Why both? They see things
differently for me. Hard to explain, this “seeing things for me” idea. I
guess it is easier explained as, “I see differently with them” as
individual tools. It’s a “mind thing.” A “getting to know your equipment
and yourself as photographer” and for lack of a better term, “see-er”
of things you want to photograph.
Let’s
say it’s a Saturday morning and my kids are lazily playing on the front
porch. It’s just a mundane, middle class, white-trash nothing of a day.
But the kind of day and activity that I find intriguing lurched behind
my Mark L. My favorite Diana clone’s flaws are its limited area of
sharpness falling off drastically at the edges when wide open, contrasty
lens, vignetted bottoms. I read many good photographers espouse that if
your photos suck, get closer…I believe that, but with a toy camera you
can hardly invade your subject’s space without some trickery utilizing a
close-up diopter or some magnifying gadget taped on the front. But what
you can get is about 3’6” from the action to get your snaps. And I do
that a lot. I am so used to it that I seem to mentally measure without
thinking. My kids don’t pose. Matter of fact, they eye-roll, guffaw and
all that other crap kids do when they see a camera. They might have a
moment of cheesy mugging that I usually miss (toy cameras are not fast
to work with generally) followed by “hurry up” or “stop taking my
picture” chortles. But me, I click, stare, and move around till they
just
ignore
me and that is when my toy camera is not just a funny smelling, tacky
blue and black accoutrement, but an extension of my emotional connection
to my subject. And no, my subjects are not only my children. I might be
shooting a roadside sign or a stranger on the street, but I’m searching
for that internal “movement” twitching in me. No shutter speed or
f-stop thoughts. Set the distance, open it up, click, advance, sometimes
with the viewfinder to my eye, many times not, only pointing the lens
at the moment and waiting to snap. I’m not documenting the activity, I’m
trying to see some emotion at 1/100th of a second, but more importantly
to get it on film in a way that will evoke that same emotion the moment
it comes out of the chemistry or upon viewing a week later, a month
later or a year or a lifetime. I call it “daring to give a damn.”
Seriously, I do. Daring to care about what you are shooting in some way.
It’s my photography mantra. Does it always work? Hell no. Has it ever?
Maybe, just maybe. But the idea of the hunt is what it’s always about.
You may say, “But Tread, you use a BB gun, I’ll choose the bazooka,” but
I would argue that a BB properly fired could blow a mind or
break a heart, while the bazooka many times misses its mark or destroys some innocence with overkill.
I promise you that nine tenths of memorable photography is little more than point and shoot chicanery, no matter what the masters may tell you; but within that is, again, that “daring to give a damn.” As a photographer who uses toy cameras as my tool, I embrace that chicanery, use that to my advantage and try desperately to reap the rewards of images that play to the guttural notions of melancholy, photography, art and the illegal-in-most-states, marriage of all three.
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