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| l'inconnu, 2001 |
dear followers
from now
on, my blog posts will be released triweekly. enjoy!
the photo
is called “l’inconnu” and is a nice example for creations produced by moving
the camera.
actionsampler by lomo
this story
is similar to the one told in blog 8 about the i-pen. only now we’re going back
to the age of analog photography, sometime in 1997. once more, it occurred in
broad daylight, triggered by a mail order catalog. and trust me, i am anything
but fond of mail order catalogs, but the universe with its often strange
coincidences literally pushed me towards this object.
a small miracle camera was advertised in this
catalog, surrounded by playing children and a grandmother with a broad and
jubilant smile. my interest was not really aimed at these laughing, happy
people, but more towards the reason for this overwhelming joy.
the camera did not only have one lens, no, it
had four of them, arranged in a square. when triggering the shutter, a disk
with a hole in it starts turning behind the four lenses. the exposure process takes
about one second during which the disk with a hole in it behind the lenses is
turning, thereby letting light pass through each lens and exposing the 35mm
film behind it. on this small-size picture format of 24x36mm, four full images
instead of one are pictured in a correspondingly smaller format with the aim of
giving the prints away.
this small plastic camera, which is basically just some sort of pinhole camera with no possibility of changing settings, immediately caught my attention. specifically the duration of one second to take four pictures was screaming out for creative interpretation! the camera was designed for capturing a moving object or an action scene. but what would happen if i radically moved the camera itself during that one second?
i could barely await taking the first
snapshots. i was especially surprised and impressed by the high imaging
performance of the four miniature lenses, which is additionally attributed to
the strong wide-angle alignment of the lenses. enlargements up to the formats
din a2 or even din a1 are possible!
the highlight, however, is the exposure time of
one second. i can either hold the camera steady and shoot four almost identical
photos. taking the same picture four times in a row already creates a special
artistic charm. but by quickly moving the camera, i will get four different
images with stronger or weaker blurriness caused by the movement. even though i
am quite fast for a native bernese man, i am much too slow for moving the
camera around when looking through the swiveling viewfinder while i am taking
the picture. i outsmart the system by aiming at the initial scene, then
pressing down the release while immediately and quickly moving the camera back
and forth through the air in a previously rehearsed loop.
it does not take a lot of imagination to
picture the astonished faces of people around me that unwillingly witness a
special kind of performance as soon as the wild man whirls this small camera through
the air. a performance with an almost signeresque touch, albeit without
explosions and generally without destruction (roman signer is a swiss artist).
well, not quite – many “flying” cameras
inwardly disintegrated due to the spring that powers the ominous shutter disk,
busted by wild movement of the camera through the air. unfortunately, the
unsteady speed of this disk often makes one of the four pictures underexposed,
especially after one of the camera’s rapid “roller coaster rides”.
the whole system comes with all kicks as well
as all disadvantages of analog photography: the price of a film and the waiting
time until the film is developed. since this camera does not have an exposure
meter, the lighting conditions have to be estimated like photographers did one
hundred years ago. it is for that reason i always have two of these cameras
with me, one with a fast film and one with a slow film in it. this comes with
an additional advantage of having a spare camera in case the other one has been
“moved” to pieces.
it took quite some time for me to find out that
this camera is part of the somewhat strange world of lomos and that the whole
thing is called lomography. today, lomography
has a large fanbase that is strictly devoted to analog photography. berlin, for
example, and many other cities have large stores filled with lomo cameras for
all likings. you can find everything about the hype surrounding lomography at www.lomo.de.
