1 post tagged “4th of july”
On the surface, you see the world through a camera the way you see the world in real life. That's why they call it a lens: it's merely the conduit to remembering what stands before it. But in actuality, of course, the relationship a photographer and his camera has is different. Evolved maybe. Different because we each know that pictures don't always turn out exactly the way we remember them. Different because sometimes they're worse, blurry, too dark, too washed out. Different because sometimes, those imperfections make them better.
That's how it was with my Russian Lomo camera.
My Lomo and I had an imperfect (if colorful) history. Lomos (as they have become known) caught fire in the late 90s as a creative alternative to standard, high-end photography. Featuring an internal gauge that helped determine how much light had hit the aperture in a given shot, you could, in theory, take low-light pictures without a flash.
It was at its inception a pretty revolutionary idea. In practice, however, the shots you'd get were a mixed bag. Sometimes the photos would come out nothing short of transcendent: rich hues that were never bleached by a sudden rush of light. On the downside, you would regularly see shots come back fuzzy, smeared with movement (because of the aforementioned gauge thing), complex.
I loved the lot of it.
I had shared a set of blurry shots with a conceptual artist in Honolulu to add to a piece he was working on some years ago; I pulled some throwaways which became a hazy extension of his creation: steel arms and legs with attached photos akimbo, providing a warm aesthetic where only hardened (if artistic) reality would have existed otherwise. Artists took to Lomo shots right away. There were never mistakes, only crisp, personality-laden captures and out of focus "experiments."
And over the years, the Lomo managed to wander off a few times: such no doubt the byproduct of shooting in bars, where the images played out like the memories -- fast, sloppy, the highs higher and the lows lower than you figured, likely -- but the camera always came home. Someone would inevitably call and remind me that I'd left it last night, that it contained my business card, that it looked dated, simple, and what kind of camera was this, exactly?
And so it was that the Lomo followed me to New York last week, and that I took it with me each day: the immediate plan was to take photos of buildings which I would, in turn, print oversized and transfer onto a large canvas. Think the Sgt. Pepper's crowd concept, only with buildings. But because of the way the low-light shots tended to turn out, and because the thought of missing a unique photo was one I couldn't bear, I carted the camera with me to Nevada Smith's, a NYC soccer-themed bar where a World Cup semifinal between France and Portugal was playing out. The place was stuffed with (mostly) French and Portugese nationals, many in full adornment, and for the next three hours or so we tilted pints and cheered and jeered with the masses in a variety of languages and temperaments.
When the game was over, we poured ourselves into a celebratory cab to hit another watering hole before dinner. The camera, best I recall, made it to the martini bar. You know how there are things that stay with you after you experience them? The smell of hotel rooms, how hard it was to open the doors in your parents' car with little hands? I find myself wanting a definitive experience to remember.
I don't have that here. I don't remember (clearly) the exact events that preceded the cab. In fact, a few martinis in and subsequently, I didn't remember taking a cab at all. Cabs in New York City are like rivers in Central Texas. Flowing all different directions at once, leading no doubt to a sea where, left to their own devices, your devices left in a cab are lost forever.
For about a day I was devastated. It's still difficult to talk about, these two weeks later, and now that Lomos are "deadstock" (no longer manufactured new), the price has gone up. They've been dolled up by resellers if you troll the web: leather facing, refurbished parts, colored flash gels. I believe in the Internet, and so I posted an ad to Craigslist's Lost and Found section and in The Village Voice.
No word. I've been contacted by a sociologist at UCLA who's studying the effects of losing things (I've been tempted to tell him, generally speaking, that the effect is, well, bad) and by a Spanish language publication who tried to sell me on ad space a la the Village Voice (but presumably in Spanish), causing me to miss a highway exit on the way to my sister's wedding. My own research seems to bear out that people in New York lose lots of things: cameras(!), laptops, wedding rings (why you took it off in a cab might be a good question to ask here), but more than anything, they lose pets. All sorts of pets.
I do admit that I took some solace in the missing items that were more valuable, theoretically speaking, than mine.
All the while, I'd give anything to have my plain old Lomo back. The first Lomo I ever owned was stolen out of my car years ago on a Sunday afternoon. This one seemed to have better bearings, and until last week, I never had to involve the police in its dissapearance. I have ten rolls of film I've shot throughout the past year, and I'm on the fence about getting them printed.
What if it makes the loss of the Lomo okay? And what, pray tell, if it doesn't?
