CANDID CAMERA
Think digital photography is killing all the fun? Meet the Lomographers putting the happy back into snapping
TEXT DUNCAN RHODES
Viva Lomo! Viva Don Simon!” cries Pasquale, our Lomo leader. The first toast is self-explanatory – I am surrounded by a group of Lomo aficionados clutching their beloved retro cameras – but who’s Don Simon? The legendary founder of the Lomography society?
“No, it is just the brand of sangria that we are drinking,” says Carlos, a 28-year-old chemist from Madrid, as Pasquale passes around the fruit punch and 50 Lomographers raise their plastic glasses in unison. “Lomography,” Carlos explains, “is all about having fun!”
It’s hard not to have fun when you’re rumbling up Las Ramblas in an open-top double-decker bus at night, sinking sangrias with a friendly bunch of photographers from all corners of the globe and singing the Don Simon advertising jingle (or miming along in my case) while occasionally aiming your camera at the passing scenery. Hand-in-hand with the carefree attitude of these Lomographers is the less-than-professional equipment we are all using on our night-time photo shoot of this beautiful city. Far from being armed with 13+ megapixels, autofocus calibration, image sensor cleaning and other cutting-edge digital technologies, we are all wielding a cheap piece of plastic that was originally manufactured in Hong Kong in the 1960s. This lightweight blue-and-black toy camera goes by the name of Diana, and we are celebrating its reintroduction to the production line by the Lomography society, some 35 years after it first turned up in the Christmas stockings of Cantonese children.
As our transport pulls up alongside the iconic, undulating facade of Gaudí’s Casa Milà, I am still grappling with the silver foil of the 120mm film and desperately trying to insert it into the back of the Diana’s flimsy plastic body. Thankfully Carlos comes to the rescue and I’m just able to press down the shutter lever and rattle off my first pic before the bus pulls away again… instinctively I look for the LCD display, but, of course, there’s no chance to review what I just shot – for that I’ll have to pay 7 euros and wait 48 hours. Fifteen minutes into this Lomo tour and I’m not sure I understand the appeal. Hasn’t Carlos heard of the digital camera?
“Yes, I have a digital camera, but I haven’t touched it for maybe a year and a half,” he says. “I always shoot film now… I’m not opposed to the use of digital photography. It has lots of advantages. It’s cheap, it’s immediate and it’s more eco-friendly as well. With good editing skills you can achieve very good results in less time. But film makes me happier! I like the analogue experience. It’s more unpredictable – and sometimes it’s nice to make mistakes.”
Carlos is just one of thousands of photographers around the world who have joined the revolution – or should that be “retrolution” – from digital to analogue photography. On many levels it doesn’t make sense, but just as there are vinyl junkies who will never be persuaded to switch to CDs (let alone MPEGs), there are some who will always remain addicted to the thrill of manual settings and the “happy accidents” of double exposures, ghosting and over-saturated colours.
One such person is Cristina Heinrichson, one of the founding members of the Lomography society. After stumbling upon a model of the Soviet-built Lomo LC-A camera in Vienna in the early 1990s, Christina and co were instantly charmed by the “unique, colourful, and sometimes blurry images” the camera produced and started taking shots and making exhibitions. “We started without any strong idea, just for fun with some friends,” she says. “When we realised that other people in other cities wanted to use this camera… the Lomo society just kept growing, and now there are communities in New York, Moscow, Paris, Berlin and Madrid and so on. It grew so big that the people who started Lomography decided to produce the Lomo and other nice cameras such as the Diana for people to have fun with.”
In other words, budding Lomographers no longer have to track down rare models of analogue brands such as Lomo, Holga and Diana in second-hand stores, but can buy new versions from the society’s own production line in an increasing number of Lomo stores around the world – such as the one in Barcelona. If these shoddy, low-fidelity instruments are what brought Lomographers around the globe together in the first place, then it’s the society’s 10 golden rules that bind them with a common purpose. Starting with rule number 1: “Take your camera everywhere you go” to number 10: “Don’t worry about any of the rules”, these commandments emphasise the Lomography society’s motto – “Don’t think, just shoot!” – which aims to disarm people of their formal knowledge of photography and encourage them to take some more spontaneous shots. As it transpires, I have already obeyed rule number 8: “You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film” and, feeling daring and the tiniest bit new wave, I casually take a shot from the hip (rule number 4) of my compadres on the bus.
As Pasquale encourages us to take make several exposures of the monstrous blue-and-red Torre Agbar (Barcelona’s answer to London’s Gherkin – and the target of similar schoolboy humour) rotating our Dianas 90 degrees each time, it strikes me that you definitely can’t do this with a digital. I sidle up to two English girls on the tour and ask them if they’ve discovered any other advantages of analogue.
“I don’t even know how to use my digital camera properly,” admits Kate, a resident of Barcelona for the past few years. “I don’t use half the functions on it because I’m never going to sit down and read the manual. I’ve found it much more exciting and learned loads more about photography using analogue. With the manual settings you have to think about the light and the focus.”
Pippa, meanwhile, is sold on the sheer sense of nostalgic romance. “You get that excitement and anxiety again when you go to get the photos. You have to wait to find out what’s going to come and you don’t know what’s going to be there. It brings back that old feeling when you were a kid and getting your holiday snaps back.”
I get the exact same thrill that Pippa describes as I nervously head down to the photo store to collect my four rolls of film. Aside from the fact that it’s costing me 28 euros to develop them, I’m worried that my ineptitude means I’m going to receive little except black prints for my efforts. In fact, I’m pleasantly surprised. A couple of shots are ruined by unintentional double exposures (I’d forgotten to wind on the film), and most are out of focus or overexposed, but among the photo-garbage are one or two real gems, such as a superbly ethereal Sagrada Familia and a great night vista of Barcelona taken from the top of Montjuïc. To think that I could perhaps have got more and better results with my Canon is to miss the point entirely. To be a Lomographer is to embrace the trouble and toil, and most of all, the unexpected. To love the organic feel of taking photos without the aid of computers and to achieve beautiful and unpredictable results. I’m not throwing my digital camera away just yet, but these days when I pick it up it just feels, well, a little bit boring…
THE 10 GOLDEN RULES OF LOMO
1. Take your camera everywhere you go
2. Use it any time – day and night
3. Lomography is not interference in your life, but part of it
4. Shoot from the hip (literally)
5. Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible
6. Don’t think
7. Be fast
8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
9. Or afterwards
10. Don’t worry about any rules
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