The Allure of the Retro

I have a dinky little digital camera that I'm pretty comfortable with. In many ways it's much better than the majority of film camera I had. For less than $100 it's not hard to find a camera that takes super clear pictures, has a 5x optical zoom and plenty of automatic features. The little silver camera that fits in my shirt pocket, goes almost anywhere and is very discrete is also quite plain.

With the death of film something is lost and whenever that happens you have a small and dedicate group that ready to go retro. One of the small trends retro cool is taking old typewriters and having them rewired into computer key boards.

It seems that when creating an image or art object part of its value is based on how difficult it is to make. Now that everyone has digital camera and the equivalent of a custom photolab in their home computer really exceptional photos are everywhere. A few days ago I was helping someone work on the cover of their upcoming book. What would have taken a whole eight hour work day in a darkroom to complete now can be done in twenty minutes over coffee.

Back to the retro cool, another small trend is the return of the pinhole camera. This is photography at it most primitive. A pinhole camera doesn't even have a lens, it focuses light through a hole. One of the odd properties of light is when it passes through a small round hole it bends the light like a lens and will create a magnified inverted image. This principal was known since the times of Aristotle and used by artist since medieval times to project an image that can be traced on to paper or painted on to canvas.  These devices are called cameras obscuras. It just took almost two thousand years to find a light sensitive chemical reaction to record the image to create photography.

Homemade pinhole camera and what it takes to develop a picture from a pinhole camera

In the earliest days of photography a silver nitrate solution was affixed to a glass plate. This was known as a wet plate method and the pictures had to be developed quickly before the plates dried. Each developed plate was a multiple step chemical process.

Like everything old has a chance of becoming new again and wet plate photography is enjoying a revival. Some artists make one of a kind handcrafted pictures using this method.  A few photographers have created a cottage industry taking these kinds of pictures for Civil War re-enactors that want go the extra mile for authenticity. And at least in the Philadelphia area there are even a few photographers using wet plate photography for weddings and portraits.

I have been told this is really a golden age for camera collectors. There are so many kinds of cameras where the film is hard to get or no longer commercially made. There are fewer and fewer places that develop film. People are abandoning their film cameras. One collector showed me a box he bought a yard sale. It had a dozen cameras inside and all of them in working order. At one time this was a couple of thousand dollars of equipment, now it was twenty dollars of stuff.

Many old cameras were made with a little bit of style, even when they don't work cameras are becoming a sort after decorative object.  Other photographers that want to recapture a look or create a distinctive image are taking old cameras and installing a chip inside. One camera I saw just had the digital camera hidden inside the frame of an older Polaroid. 

Another was a custom retro fitted Rolleiflex. On the outside it was all classic styling but inside there was a 20 megapixel chip and a wifi  connection. So he even when he was far from home he could download picture and remotely print or post them.

Image is a funny thing. It reminds of one filmmaker who made documentaries.  He had some of the best digital equipment but he use to also carried around an old broken video camera from the 1970's. In people's minds the big shoulder held camera was a "serious" camera and therefore he must be a serious filmmaker.   Several times he conducted interviews where the subject is looking at the looking at the old camera and is really being recorded on one or more newer cameras.