I discovered the camera cost $9.98 and was point and shoot made entirely of plastic.
Who could resist that?
Some years ago I was heading out on a multi-week, if not month road trip. A chance to wonder the back roads of our country and meet America. A few days before I was to leave a friend showed me a long, narrow photograph, a kind of panorama view, and suggested I take the camera that made this print along. My camera bag was already filled with thousands of dollars worth of photo equipment – I hardly needed more. Then I discovered the camera cost $9.98 and was point and shoot made entirely of plastic. Who could resist that?
I don’t remember where I was when I finally took it out of the box, loaded film, aimed it at a mesa in New Mexico, and pushed the button. To describe myself as a less than high tech person would be something of an understatement, so when I pushed that button and heard the simple plastic click, I was hooked. I am, however, supposed to be some sort of an artist, so I needed to be “creative” with my $9.98 plastic camera. Since it had no controls, my only option was to turn the camera so it made tall, thin images instead of long, narrow ones as it was designed to do. I would also use rubber bands to hold filters over the lens area to alter the gray tones. It was great. Camera and film in one pocket, filters and rubber bands in another and I was all set. It was photography nirvana for me.
I envisioned tall, poster sized prints with mesa tops at the bottom and the sky soaring above. I arrived back home with a bag full of unprocessed film and a child’s excitement at Christmas in anticipation of the images I would make.
Turns out, the one flaw in my magical plastic camera was the lens. A $9.98 camera may not have the best ground glass for its lens. In fact, it did not have glass at all. In terms of capturing a sharp image, plastic is not the idea material.
The images in the poster sized prints I tried to make simply fell apart. So, I kept making them smaller until I got a picture you could recognize. That turned out to be 2x6 inches, hardly a poster. These negatives were not going to do what I had intended for them, so, I was either going to throw out a small fortunes worth of film, or I was going have to come up with another idea.
These are eight separate prints from the same negative, four printed normally and four with the negative flipped, and mounted together to form this receptive pattern.