At our feet lay a people’s history. The sprawl of the city became the sprawl of the flea market as we walked down 39th from Midtown towards the Hudson River. The street was lined with tables, racks, crates and piles of clothes, records, postcards, photos, forgotten mementos and souvenirs to places that no longer exist. Every so often you might come across a table strewn with camera bodies and lenses, mostly old Nikon and Olympus bodies, the odd Minolta lens among the more numerous Rokinon glass, a digital point-and-shoot, true obsolescence among forgotten formats and of course one or two TLRs (none of them bearing the Rollei or Mamiya name, or even the Yashica or Minolta name).
As I rummaged through this tabletop boneyard I noticed someone staring at me from a few feet away. He was skinny, enough that his clothes hung loosely on his slight frame, shaved head, nondescript tattoos, he might have been wearing glasses, but he was definitely carrying a black tote bag. I can’t say I remember what shoes he was wearing, only that he wore shoes, only that he smiled, only that he spoke first as I inspected a camera, what make or model I cannot remember. I haven’t found much, what about you? Or something to that effect. Nah, no luck. He asked me if I was looking for anything specific. I told him a TLR, though nothing specifically. To resell or personal use? Personal use, I responded as I continued to move between tables of knick-knacks. He recommended I look into Yashicas. You can find them pretty cheap, but they’re quality builds. I acknowledged his recommendation with a nod as we moved further apart. (Goodbye stranger, yung deus ex machina.)
At this point in time (April of last year) I had very little working knowledge of TLRs. All I knew was that I wanted to shoot medium format portraits and TLRs were the best bang for my buck, a perfect mediation of quality, price and technological accessibility for a novice. This is as true as any generalization is wont to be, but it was true enough as to suggest a starting point within medium format.
I became enamoured with the Twin Lens Reflex the first time I saw the world mirrored in the ground glass, and even as I peered through the clouded viewfinder I felt like Celidonius. To see in a new way is to see for the first time again. I’d like to pretend this love affair was devoid of fetish, but an entire genre of photography exists on social media to fetishize the waist-level viewfinder of TLRs and other medium format cameras. Yet this can hardly do justice to the experience of holding a camera at waist level and looking at the world through the ground glass, eyes shifting back and forth between the viewfinder and the scene before the camera.
The work produced by a medium format camera bears only the faintest trace of the auratic quality of the technology itself: in technical terms we understand that the larger negative of medium format allows for a greater dynamic range, depth of field and resolution, but these differences are best appreciated by looking through the viewfinder instead of a zine or photo book. When the only thing between the world and me is the ground glass of a TLR, the camera introduces a reality of slightly different dimensions than the one that stands before the lens or the one perceived by me behind the camera; while the image printed after the fact, divorced from these two points of reference which the camera enjoys, offers only the final mediated version of reality.
The auratic qualities of art are diminished by its technological reproducibility, according to Walter Benjamin who was particularly interested in photography and film in this regard. I am less interested in challenging Benjamin’s definition of art (indeed as he himself was less interested in articulating a definition of art than in articulating its function in contemporary society) than in articulating the way in which the auratic qualities of any media are omnipresent for the artist if not the consumer of their art.
For a novice selecting a camera is an existential crisis. This crisis only intensifies with time and a little knowledge, just enough that, like Socrates, the only thing revealed is the depth of the photographer’s ignorance. There is a permanence to the decision in the mind of the novice such as we conceive when we are children choosing a career or occupation; a predicament akin to, borrowing from a childhood favorite, choosing a starter Pokemon.
In selecting a camera and format the novice photographer is choosing out of a myriad directions the one that they will take. Yet the novice status of the photographer implies a lack of direction, and worse yet no intuition as to which way to go. Like the rest of us who resort to acts of bad faith in the face of daily existential crises, the novice photographer might continually surrender to the facticity of this status and believe the kind of spooks in the psychology of consumption which give rise to commodity fetishism and brand identification.
Leica is perhaps the ne plus ultra of commodity fetishim within photography. This subject deserves its own essay, but here I bring it up only to illustrate the kind of spooks which the novice photographer must assimilate or reject. For the history of Leica is immaterial and imaginary, and the assumptions that this history produces are merely that: assumptions of continuity, assumptions of innovation and assumptions of quality. The immutable core of Leica is nothing more than a set of standards and operating procedures. The material moving parts themselves are like the planks of Theseus’ ship, although Leica loyalists would appeal to the historical imaginary of Leica, like the many years the factory stood in Wetzlar until it was relocated in 1986 when the company changed its name from Leitz, to prove continuity.
Of course Leica is but one example, the Canon and Nikon names are similarly mythologized. Again, this subject deserves its own essay, but I must admit that as a novice photographer I too acted in bad faith when I bought my first camera solely on the reputation of the brand. It was a fine camera, as Nikon builds tend to be, but it did not fit me and my ambitions well, and so I only used it a handful of times, enough to realize my mistake. And even this may have been an act of bad faith, wherein I told myself the limits to my photographic expression were the result of the limits of my tools and not the limits of my own creativity and expertise.
I remember an evening on the John Muir Trail photographing Half Dome as the sun was setting with two friends, both fellow photographers. Justen, who by this point had been a photographer much longer than Tony or myself, was teasing us as we frantically made increasingly minute adjustments between each picture. For the uninitiated it must have looked like two madmen waltzing with ghosts, the ghosts of what we saw but was not there and could not be captured. Is it perfect yet? It wasn’t, it would never be, but we waltzed on until the veil of alpenglow was lifted from the granite by darkness. I realize now what I didn’t then, as intuitive as this should be: we falter before we stand and stumble before we walk, all learning is a process.
I kept this in mind when I decided to begin shooting medium format. It has been at least as many years since I last shot, developed and printed my own black and white film as it has been since I started shooting digital. For all intents and purposes I am learning to work with film for the first time again, both because color film requires a different process and because it has been so long since I worked with any film. From the beginning I have conceived of this endeavor as a long term process with many phases, allowing space and time for the eventualities I cannot predict along the way, especially those that arise from my inexperience.
Conceiving of photography this way has diminished the anxiety which arises from the gap between my creative ambition and my inexperience. I realize now that my fate as a medium format photographer is not tied to the Yashica Mat 124G, or the Pentax 67 that one day will replace it for even that camera will be but an intermediary point in a much longer process. It isn’t that the old adage is wrong, only that we interpret it cynically in the context of professional photography which tends to fetishize specific technologies and turn process into dogma. The best camera is the one you have, if only because it will rarely be the same one every time you put viewfinder to eye.
Of course once you have chosen the format you want to shoot, once you have chosen the make and model, there is still the question of selecting the camera that will be yours, out of the vast array of cameras in circulation. If you are purchasing new this is not an issue, but if the make and model chosen is out of production or otherwise purchasing new is cost prohibitive this presents yet another crossroads, this one of seemingly Borgesian proportions (for it is, in a sense, like staring into the abyss of time, trying to count a subset of its stars).
We refer to the primary component of the camera as the body, and this term provides an analogue for understanding the way in which the passage of time becomes manifest in the body and transmogrifies it, for we need only regard our own bodies to understand that the language of existence is entropy. To be is to decay, and we all decay differently, so that two cameras of the same make and model, off the same factory floor, part of the same batch, once in possession of the consumer (or before that, if we are being honest) become wholly different.
Purchasing a used camera is an act of trust. To do so you must learn a new language, and all of its dialects. Each major camera vendor and reseller has its own scale to communicate the condition of the photographic equipment being sold to the consumer. As much as any one scale attempts to create a standard, it cannot eliminate human subjectivity from the process of judging the condition of an item, it can only reduce and concentrate this subjectivity on a set of standards arbitrarily selected from a continuum between mint condition and salvage. The subjectivity which it is trying to mitigate is the same which gave birth to it as a system of signification.
It is only at both ends of this spectrum that one finds objectivity, for the subjective points between either extreme are defined by their proximity to one or the other and as such these values must be fixed. These values are not objective because they are fixed, rather they are fixed because their objectivity can easily be verified: mint condition means one and one thing only regardless of the assessor, and this is similarly true for equipment broken beyond repair and only suitable for parts.
I ultimately decided to pay top dollar for a near mint condition Yashica Mat 124g from a Japanese camera vendor, though the consensus seems to be that reasonably working cameras can be had for a third less if you’re willing to settle for something a little rough around the edges. It wasn’t just that I wanted an unambiguous guarantee as to the condition of the camera. Yashica halted production of this camera in 1986, and ceased production altogether in 2005 (at the time it was owned by Kyocera Corporation). Maintenance and repairs are expensive and require specialized knowledge and skill sets. While a flawless exterior does not guarantee intact innerworkings, the correlation is sufficient to offer me some peace of mind. At least until I can run a roll of film through it.
At the moment I’ve selected a camera. This feels like enough, but it isn’t. It’s an expensive paperweight until I shoot a roll of film. But shooting my first roll of 120 color film will present its own crisis. Or rather a series of crises that sometimes occur in a linear fashion, like numbers on a frame counter, but more often seem to arise exponentially, each emerging crisis compounding the last. My hope, my suspicion, is that each crisis will chisel away at my inexperience, but my unspoken fear is that what will emerge from the crucible of this process will be a liar. I thought I wanted to take pretty pictures, but I just want them to be honest.
