collision detection: I see dead media

August 13, 2005

I see dead media

I always figured that old photos look old because they're, uh, old -- i.e. they've spent a couple of decades mouldering in Aunt Ida's attic, and they've faded and creep-ified with age. But the blogger over at Smallest Photo recently got his hands on a fully-functioning Autographic Kodak Junior Model A from around 1914. He took a bunch of pictures with it, and sure enough, they too look as metallically eerie and ghostlike as if they'd been lost in archives for a century. That picture above is of the graveyard at St. Mary's Church in Wimbledon; he's got a few others at his site. Of the camera, he notes:

One particularly interesting feature is that there's a small door in the back which houses a metal stylus. By opening a small window that opened onto the back of the film paper as it moved through the camera and applying pressure with the stylus, you could compress the emulsion on the film. This allowed you to record a text image of your choice giving you the opportunity of naming each particular frame.This medium fomat camera takes 120 film. Speeds 25, 50, T, B.f stops 4 - 64.

A built-in f/x device! Anyway, I don't know why I should have been so surprised by these pictures; it's obvious that different media have different aesthetics. (My personal fave is the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which shoots images of such low-fi black-and-white weirdness that Michael Almereyda used it to shoot a vampire's-eye view of the world in his horror flick Nadja.) Though we tend to think that today's 9-bazillion-megapixel cameras are capturing reality with increasing precision, I wonder what sort of aesthetic bias we'll find it when, fifty years hence, we haul out the vacation shots we took this summer.

(Thanks to Jason Kottke for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at August 13, 2005 09:05 PM

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Comments

REGARDING THE KODAK "AUTOGRAPHIC" CAMERAS--THEY CAME IN 116 (LARGER) & 120 (SMALLER) PICTURE SIZES. AS I RECALL, THEY REQUIRED SPECIAL "AUTOGRAPHIC" FILM IF YOU WANTED TO RECORD A MESSAGE (ACROSS THE NAROW [2 1/4 INCH] SIDE OF THE PICTURE. THE FILM IN THOSE DAYS WAS UNBELIEVABLY SLOW AND DISTANCE SETTINGS ON THE CAMERAS RATHER CRITICAL--THEY WERE FOLD-UPS, NOT BOX CAMERAS, IF YOUR PICTURE IS NOT CLEAR, THE DISTANCE SETTING WAS PROBABLY OFF.--ABLEBAKER

Posted by: ABLEBAKER at August 13, 2005 10:24 PM

Flickr's "Holga" tag has other nice old-timey, medium format photos.

Posted by: ScottSimpson at August 13, 2005 10:38 PM

Albebaker, cool info -- have you ever used one of those cameras?

That Flickr tag rocks ... I wonder if Flickr has any actual taken-on-an-old-camera pix in there anywhere?

Posted by: Clive at August 13, 2005 11:56 PM

Thanks for the linkup!

AbleBaker - you are correct about the film. I use 120 which gives me 8 shots per roll.

Clive: There is such a group which can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/vintagecameras/

Posted by: Smallest Photo at August 14, 2005 11:48 AM

Robot: didn't Richard Linklater use Pxlvision in the later club scsnes in SLACKER?

Posted by: MoXmas at August 14, 2005 6:21 PM

MoXmas, yes, I think he did!

Smallest Photo, those modern-vintage photos on Flickr are really excellent! And there's 811 of 'em.

Posted by: Clive at August 14, 2005 7:10 PM

'Modern' photography will probably look notable for having washed out colors. The color depth of most display devices today sucks, and we're using 3-color photography, which looks vastly inferior to 6-color photography, but there's no point in doing the better thing without a suitable display device.

It will probably start happening around, oh, 2040, when we get bored of simply filling entire walls with 300dpi displays.

Posted by: Bram at August 14, 2005 7:52 PM

I HAVEN' USED AN "AUTOGRAPHIC" SINCE 1939. I SHOULD HAVE ADDED THAT KEEPING THE LENS OPENING AS SMALL AS THE FILM SPEED WILL PERMIT GIVES A SHARPER PICTURE. LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT AN UNBELIEVABLE CAMERA FROM THE LATE 1930'S. THE "BOX" VERSION OF THE "UNIVEX" COST 29 CENTS, FOLDING MODEL $2. FILM WAS 10 CENTS A ROLL. TOOK SAME SIZE PICTURE AS 35 MM CAMERAS. COMMENT ABOVE WAS CORRECT ABOUT 120 FILM--AFTER ABOUT 1930. PREVIOUSLY IT WAS 6 EXP. ABLEBAKER

Posted by: ABLEBAKER at August 15, 2005 11:58 PM