My new toy TLR. Only the bottom lens is functional: the top one is strictly for decoration.
Retro anything always catches my eye: so, when adverts for a twin-lens reflex (TLR) toy camera turned up on my social media feeds I paid attention. A cranky German-made Rolleicord TLR film camera I bought years ago on eBay from an even crankier 80-something retired professional photographer sits unused in one of my closets. It’s clunky, hard to use and requires film that is as expensive as it is difficult to find. The toy version was all digital and palm sized. The weightiness of steel, history and precision engineering was nowhere to be found with this camera: if anything, the toy TLR felt mischievous, and I liked that.
These days I use an iPhone to take pictures. They’re clean, sleek and have excellent resolution. They can also be manipulated to resemble the faux vintage effects I coveted when I studied art photograph twenty years ago. Nevertheless, the toy TLR beckoned from beyond bounds that screamed waste of money. I made a deal with my own austerity. If I could find one for less than what I saw advertised on the manufacturer’s website, I’d make the allowance. Within a few weeks I scored one for one-third the selling price. My inner child turned cartwheels and cheered.
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Camera obscura is a Latin phrase that means darkened chamber. It refers to a device with a small hole that collects light – and an external object(s) on which it shines – from the outside that is then projected on a surface within the chamber. A camera obscura can be as small as a box and as large as a building. The image collected in such a device is upside down because of how light interacts with the opening or aperture. How a camera obscura works creates images is how our eyes work, with the brain turning the image right side up. In modern cameras, lenses do the work of flipping images and returning the upside down to normalcy.
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The focus is inexact, the lens doesn’t pick up color subtleties and the colors sometimes bleed. But many of the images from this toy TLR still manage to please.
It wasn’t so much about having the toy TLR as it was about going back to equipment I loved using before I made a cell phone my primary photographic tool. There was more of course. I had taken up photography during a time when I was recuperating from illness that could have turned life-threatening. There was no illness this time, but I had been set back the better part of a year by a serious condition that if unchecked could also have turned life-threatening. Buying the camera had been an unconscious act of remembering: not so much the illness but recovery from the unthinkable.
As I got to know my new TLR and the quirks of its control system, it came to me that my desire for a camera may also have reflected what I had become in recent months. Without realizing it I had evolved into a human camera obscura taking in, at second hand through social media and international news outlets, more details about the world than ever before. What I had been witnessing, however, didn’t make sense, even after images got flipped right side up and my brain struggled to find reason in the chaos. Everything remained upside down no matter what gymnastics my brain tried to do. It was then I realized that the act of buying this camera had something to do with a longing for communion with tool that at its core was a sense-making instrument.
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The best phootgraphic tools from the pre-digital age are essentially upgrades of the camera obscura that offer control - or the illuision of it - over shutter speed, aperture and exposure time. Toy cameras, whether analog or digital, have almost no controls. The images they produce are grainy, are under or over-exposed and have poor resolution and give viewers the impression the pictures could have been shot decades before 1991, the year the first commercially available digital camera, a Kodak Professional DCS 100. became available.
When I still worked with film, my favorite camera was a $20 square black plastic box called a Holga that needed electrician’s tape to keep the halves together. It had exactly two controls: a crude shutter and a manual film advance wheel. Like my digital TLR, it took surreal, faux-vintage- style pictures. I never knew what to expect and liked it that way so every visit to the photo processing store became an adventure. Over time the photos became a form of rebellion against digital technology and its obsession with images indistinguishable—or even more perfect than—the real-world subjects they captured.
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For certain kinds of photographers, imperfection is also an aesthetic statement that isn’t just about liberation from what has since become techno-autocracy. There is beauty in the inexact, a poetry that celebrates chance distortions. At the same time, those imperfections remind us of times before techno-autocracy, times that seem gentler. Like memories, the vintage-style photographs toy cameras produce seem comfortable because we know them. Because in the end, retro is solace.
Yet the uniqueness of toy camera images are reminders that moments aren’t things to be hoarded like the wealth that creates greed and destroys societies. Each is a record of possibility and infinitesimal change, even in the face of evidence that suggests with a wink, a nod and a con that everything only ever stays the same.
