The Yashica Electro 35 GSN: Don’t Get Too Excited

The Yashica Electro 35 series of rangefinder cameras were produced in great numbers in the 1970s. The internet hive mind, filled with whatever ideas percolate through the collective consciousness of people interested in running film through old cameras, has judged them and largely found them good – “poor man’s Leica” is a term that you find, and this is meant positively. The GSN variant purportedly features corrosion-resistant gold-plated interconnects and commands a slight premium because gold is obviously better than not-gold.

Behold, the Yashica Electro 35 GSN. This is a camera review, not a beauty contest, so I’ll say no more here.

Enter me. I'd been sniffing around the Leica mystique for a while, like a hungry coyote that doesn't quite trust a morsel of possibly poisoned meat. I wanted to muck around with a rangefinder (for the usual slew of wooly, misguided notions). I wasn't sure enough about the whole thing that I wanted to go all-in on a Leica, though. And so I picked up an Electro 35 GSN for less than the cost of a Leica lens cap.

Here's the short version of this review. Yes, the Yashica Electro 35 is a poor man's Leica, but not in any optimistic, egalitarian sense. More in the sense that the poor man doesn't have access to the expensive material things that the rich man does, so he makes do with something cheaper and gets on with his life. Like a Leica, the Electro is a 35mm rangefinder camera. If you want to take good pictures, you can certainly do it with the Electro, just as you could with a Leica or a thousand other cameras. And if you don't know what you're doing, the Electro will work better for you than a Leica of similar vintage because it automatically sets the shutter speed for you.

The Electro 35 can make a properly exposed, in-focus photograph. Sorry about the low-res scan.

If you want a basic understanding of what using a rangefinder to focus a full-sized 35mm camera is like (I did), well, the Electro kind of delivers. You can indeed align a fuzzy yellow patch with the main image in the viewfinder to focus. The viewfinder on my mine was decidedly low-contrast, and I suspect this will be the case for most Electros: they aren't expensive enough to make servicing economically likely, and the viewfinder housing is hardly hermetically sealed so you're going to be looking through thirty-plus years of gently deposited gunge. Just think, there's particulate from leaded gasoline in there, maybe even some residue from atmospheric nuke testing. 

Even with a gummy viewfinder, accurate focus is possible.

So yes, it takes pictures. But if you're after the gladdening solidity of a metal camera, the tactile experience of exquisitely precise mechanical controls, the whiff of a past that you suspect, in heart if not mind, is somehow better than our present, the Electro is likely to disappoint.

“Fie on you!” exclaims a happy Electro owner somewhere. “This wonderful camera is indeed made of metal!” To which I agree, yes, it is. Like a can of lighter fluid, which is what the camera feels like in your hand. It's heavy (a mostly full can), but it's even bigger than the weight suggests, giving it a hollow, chintzy feel in comparison to the better metal-age offerings. The back of mine moved when you pressed on it, which seemed to be by design. That's what light seals are for, right?

The aperture ring had a soggy, mushy feel. Maybe this was just my sample, but I'm dubious, since the camera seemed to be in good shape in general. It did give some tactile feedback at a stop, but not much: rather than click into position, it kind of slumped.

The focus ring is narrow and close to the body, with two stubby tab-like things for grip. Turn that ring and you'll encounter my biggest gripe about the Electro's ergonomics: your left hand, on the ring, will run into your right hand, gripping the camera body. Why, you may wonder, is that happening, especially if you have effete little 21st-century-man-fingers like I do? A puzzled look at the camera reveals that it’s because the Electro's lens is skewed towards the right side of the body. Maybe people of the era had a different way of holding a camera, since lost to the sands of time.

And then there's the shutter button. I should say, shutter pole: you could fly a flag off that thing. The Electro's shutter release has enough travel to earn frequent flier miles. Forget about shutter lag: you need to plan enough time to drive that button all the way into the camera body before the shutter even knows something is up.

This design decision is tied to the way the camera's meter works. Now, if you've chosen a reasonable aperture for your scene you can probably just mash the button and get a properly exposed shot. But if you take your time and ease it in there, you might notice some lights in the viewfinder. Somewhere near the beginning of the press, you might see a red light if the meter decides you need something faster than the 1/500th sec minimal exposure time -- you can stop down until the light goes off. Then there's a lull as the button continues on its merry way until you get down around the bottom third of its trip, where a yellow underspeed warning lights if you're into shake-induced blur territory (the camera can still make a properly exposed shot if you insist, but you'd better have steady hands).

Note the Electro’s proud shutter release and the red and yellow over and under-speed warning lights, also visible in the viewfinder.

So, with the lights, no news is good news. But the setup can be annoying -- you'll hopefully have an idea if one or the other condition applies, but knowing for sure means exploring along the button's travel to find the right zone. Is this a common approach to metering in cameras of this epoch? I don’t know, honestly, but in the modern era it feels pretty kludgy.

When you finally work that button all the way down, you hear a dry snap. That's the leaf shutter doing its thing. It doesn't sound nice to me, but I suppose that's even more subjective than the rest of the stuff here, so don't worry about it. On the up side, it's definitely quiet, even by contemporary mirrorless standards.

You've taken a picture! Time to wind on and rearm the shutter. The lever that does this lacks the smooth, ludicrously refined feel of a rich man's Leica. But I guess it's good enough for poor people, or in any case, all they're going to get from Yashica.

Conclusion

The Electro is fine, OK? It has its charms. With every other camera maker undermining the retro-osity of rangefinders with new models that look old, the Electro still manages to look retro. Maybe not classy, Leica M3 retro, but the tinsel-and-glitter retro of the decade that birthed it. I guess it was cool enough for Spiderman 4, in which, I learned from some Spanish guy's eBay ad, the Electro apparently features. I’d be more impressed if it was in the first one.

Despite its glam looks, the Electro's shutter makes it relatively discreet to shoot.

And the Electro makes fine pictures. You can't take that away from it. That hulking (by rangefinder standards) 45mm lens works as well as any other normal double-gauss design, which is to say very well indeed, and the auto exposure beats sunny 16 most of the time.

But the Yashica, despite being metal, is not Metal. It does not rock. It's not particularly fun to shoot, or comfortable, or beautiful. If the Yashica Electro asked me to write it a recommendation, I'd wince inside, then feel like a bit of jerk when I sat down and really pondered my problems with it, but still would have trouble putting a good spin on it. There are just things that are so much better out there.

If you're still curious about the Electro 35 after reading this, the cost of entry is low (usually under $50), and you can always sell it on for about what you paid. I suspect that this kind of recycling, as much as their abundant production run, helps explain why there are so many on eBay. That’s where mine went: catch and release.

Update, four years later: Another 35 GSN landed in my hands recently, so I checked out some of my possibly sample-specific gripes. This one is in visibly better condition, but that doesn’t make it any prettier. While the basic ergonomic issues I grump about above still pertain (weird grip and focus, long throw shutter and arming lever) I can report that the aperture selector feel is definitely nicer on this one: it’s not quite a confident, even click, but it’s adequately positive. On the other hand, this sample has a bit of play in the part of the lens that moves to focus. As the decades pass, each of these cameras becomes more and more an individual.

Splitting Utility and Passion

Many of us, maybe most of us, are attached to things, care about things. We pick up our carry-ons when exiting burning airliners, which isn't really the same but makes a nice metaphor. The folly of materialism has been well explored and you should probably spend some quality time considering it. But for now, let's consider cameras.

I've owned some half-dozen digital cameras since the new millennium dawned. Each one (except the first, which fell into my lap like a careless match flicked into a barrel of oily rags) was hotly anticipated, greeted with great excitement. Each was fawned over, imbued with an importance that felt durable, fundamental to its qualities. And despite that, each was eventually set aside (save the last) in favor of something "better" for what I imagined my photographic project to be. Anyone with a digital camera history can guess at what got me excited: the ability to work with a paucity of light, to focus faster and more accurately, to record more detail. It all sounds kind of silly now, but that's not the point.

This progression, from torrid passion to dismissal in favor of the new thing, is something that I suspect is hardwired into our primate selves. Consumer capitalism has made a fine art of exploiting it, fanning the flames of desire for the next shiny thing with surgical precision, to layer cliches.

One of its favorite techniques is something I’ve seen referred to as the "demotion effect," though I googled this and couldn’t figure out if the term is in wide use. Regardless of terminology, you’ve almost certainly experienced it. You get a new thing, and you're happy. It’s the best thing! All the reviews say so! Then they make a new new thing that's nominally better, and your now-old thing, which hasn't changed since yesterday, suddenly seems less capable. You were happy with it before, but now you're not. And we all want to be happy. The solution is obvious. The very temporary solution.

It's easy to imagine how much "better" your photographs would be with a "better" camera. The bitter but also beautiful truth is that the only substantive upgrade is "no camera" to "camera." (Be sure to picture my air quotes as you read.)

The crazy thing is that, as with a lot of these primate deep-brain twitches, knowing the trick doesn't automatically immunize you to the effect. You would have to go through a process of introspection and careful evaluation to defuse the marketers' hold on you, and who the hell has time for that? I propose an easier way. This only works for cameras, but cameras are the only thing that really matters.

The solution is this: fall in love with the last of the line. Embrace extinction. I'm talking about film cameras. They stopped making new ones* (except for toy cameras and sculptures) a long time ago. All the good ones, the very best ones, are already here, and have been for decades. You can cut the line and start with the end. Take your love, open the back of your camera, and load it in there. Then do it again and again, because love is inexhaustible, and film will almost certainly outlive you despite the dire prognostications of a few pessimistic prognosticators.

With your love safely banked, you're free to see your digital camera for what it is: a very capable and useful tool that you will one day probably need to replace. "They" can keep rolling out shiny new things, and you can smile indulgently as folks froth at the mouth about a quarter-stop of additional dynamic range on sensors that can already record fireworks and fireflies in the same shot at billboard resolutions, because you never know when you'll want to make a billboard. Good for them, you can think, as you load a fresh roll of slide film.

To recap: digital cameras are just tools. Embrace extinction.

Your digital camera will probably die before you, but then you can get another one without the emotional whiplash of love or broken dreams being invloved, much as you'd get a new hammer if yours snapped and sent the steel head whanging just past your eye. That the new camera will be "better" in some benchmarkable ways will be a nice bonus (and don't cheap out on a hammer again, you bonehead -- you only get two eyes, no replacing those). But that betterness (the camera's) won’t lead you to delude yourself that owning the new thing will open transformative avenues of expression and/or revolutionize the practice of your photography, because you’ve put your delusions, along with your love (and is there really a difference?) into your film camera. In fact, by the time whatever digital camera you have now shuffles off, your phone will probably be fine taking up the slack. Or you’ll be wearing a digital camera all the time anyway.

Good film cameras, of course, never die: they merely pause their function to request service. The vessel for your love will live on and if the order of things is preserved will make its final exit when you're not around to suffer it, which is also what children are for, so don't forget to make time for those. And be sure to tell them that the camera gear you're hoarding in the closet might be worth something when you're gone, if only to a few foolish souls soldiering along right behind you.

---

*Yes, someone still makes new ones, but they're just new old ones, not new new ones.

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

"One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong.
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?"

Simple nomenclature gives the naive answer: we are looking at two cameras and a phone. Two things specifically for taking pictures, and one for doing that and everything else. Two things bumpy with knobs and knurled rings, one as glossy smooth as a eunuch’s freshly shaved pate. Two special-purpose, dedicated devices, and the ultimate info-communicative Swiss Army knife of our age. Two machines rooted in yesterday, and one shaping tomorrow.

But suppose we ask an alien the question. E.T. sees two electronic devices packed with silicon, millions of transistors, powered by lithium-ion batteries, and one spring-driven machine. Two with liquid crystal displays, one with none. All three feature multi-element glass lenses designed to focus light onto a plane, but two put the light on a silicon sensor, while one focuses it on removable photosensitive film. Two self-focus the lenses with motors and feedback algorithms, while the other implements a kind of mechano-optical analog computer (a coupled rangefinder) allowing a user to manually calculate a focus distance. Two record the image on identical electronic chips in compatible file formats, while one relies on photochemical processes to recover a latent image. Two are the products of a space-faring race, one is a relic of planet-bound times.

Of course, classed by purpose, the phone is the odd one out. But in nearly every other way, the mechanical camera is a completely different beast from the kissing cousins of the phone and the digicam. Apart from the design requirement of holding a lens perpendicular to a sensor, the digital camera is a cosmetic homage to its mechanical predecessor, a decorative exterior wrapped around a functional core that is little different from that of the phone.

The superficial similarity between the two cameras helps conceal the truth of the more recent device. The new camera is a substantial consumer investment, but unlike the old camera (and like the phone) it depreciates ferociously. Its resale value will decrease in a stair pattern over several years as newer models are released, until it stops competing with the state-of-the-art and its value gradually sinks to some trivial baseline. If it experiences a fault in this later part of its life, its economic value drops abruptly and permanently to zero because a repair will cost more than the functional camera is worth.

Superficial similarity is what makes half of street photography go 'round. These apparent parallels are rare enough to feel like "finds" and they seem vaguely clever if you don't think about them at all. Note how I turn the "people photographed from behind" trope (evident in something more than half of street photography, I'll wager) and use it to my advantage to erase the subjects' otherwise-distracting individuality. That was totally on purpose.

Historically, obsolete objects have often passed through a trough of zero or negative value before resurfacing as antiques or fetishes of nostalgia. But it’s difficult to see this happening for digital cameras or much of the vast flow of digital detritus we’ve been generating for the last three decades. Apart from a few early, low-production-volume examples of technologies that might accrue collector value, this stuff becomes garbage and will stay garbage. Toxic garbage, cocktails of contaminants waiting to be spilled (examine your digital camera and you’re probably find a “10” circled by arrows, assuring you that all that nastiness will stay locked up for at least 10 years – a whole decade! – before you have to worry about it leaking into the world). These objects, the pinnacle of our production capacity, the most refined technologies we have made, are fundamentally disposable. Their potential functional lives are short, and their actual service lives, before they are replaced by “better” versions, even shorter. Minimizing the delta between those spans maximizes profits for producers and guarantees an ample supply of irreparable junk for the near future.

Locations of Digital Electronics You Own Today in 20 Years

Contrast this with the mechanical camera. Over fifty years old, its value is higher than that of the two-year-old digital camera. Its mythologized brand is partly responsible for this, but only partly: many, many mechanical cameras made from the 1950s to 1970s are worth much more now than digital cameras made ten years ago. And because they are valued and can be practically repaired, there is an ecosystem of skilled craftspeople in place that keeps them working, a virtuous cycle.

“Who gives a fig about the relative values of cameras?” you might say if you’re in a Shakespearean mood. “I just want take pictures!” To which I say, godspeed you happy snapper. None of this has anything to do with photography per se. But as a story of objects, of tools, I find it fascinating. We humans are tool-users and have always been in some way defined by the things we carry. Understanding the nature of those things and when they are not what they appear to be sheds light on ourselves.

The going flavor of consumer capitalism exploits our connection with objects mercilessly: our readiness to identify with and be identified by things, and our susceptibility to the notion that the new thing is better than the old thing, make us easy marks for salesmen. Photography stands out among creative practices for the conspicuous importance of the technologies of its production, so it’s easy to convince people that “better” cameras are better for the practice. Few would argue that “photography” on the whole is “better” now than ten or twenty or fifty years ago, but never mind, it's Black Friday!

Stubborn old cameras and their resilient value suggests that many of us do actually appreciate their relative strengths and the knock-on effects of their birth in a time before short-term obsolescence was a fundament of business plans. Perhaps cultural fatigue with disposable consumerism is building. Perhaps I’m just glorifying another way to purchase identity. I don’t have all the answers. But I like my old camera, in part because I appreciate how little it has in common with my new camera.

The Future of Photography Has No Cameras or Photographers (Part 2)

Part 1 of this essay addresses cameras. Now we get to photographers.

Like the smugly flatulent unicorn on the ark, photographers are an endangered species.

I'm going to call © Peter M. Ferenczi on this as a derivative work. If some undead medieval glass painter has a problem with that, step up, fool.

So, that's cameras. But circling back to my click-baity headline, what happens to the photographers? In my future so far, they’re still there, taking pictures, even if the camera never leaves their face.

That won’t last. At first, there will be a constant capture feature that lets people retrospectively “take” a photograph. Some cameras can already do this, but having full-time recording would change the game fundamentally. When something happens that you wish you’d shot, you just rewind and mark the image (or video clip -- I think the distinction will become ever-blurrier) for storage. From there it’s a small step to recording everything and keeping it, just in case you decide much later that it was worthwhile (and of course for more nefarious advertising reasons). This is the idea behind the apparently still-born but actually just premature “life-logger” product category, a viable idea in advance of the technological and social structures needed to make it widely appealing.

In this PR shot from Narrative, we see an attractive, diverse group of friends wearing the company's life-logger, the Narrative Clip 2. Narrative recently declared on its blog that it was "filing for voluntary dissolution," which is presumably the corporate equivalent of conscious uncoupling. Then, 20 days or so later, the blog blurted out that a group of employees had acquired the assets of the company and it would soldier on in some form. Astoundingly, this announcement was made without reference to "the story continuing" or similar.  

© Narrative

But it will appeal, especially when it’s a feature of something indispensable for a million other reasons rather than a ridiculous nerd necklace. And super-especially when combined with the kind of artificial intelligence that lets people have pictures without needing to take them. Even today, ordinary people generate more digital images than they know what to do with. The volume is overwhelming, and the accepted wisdom is that few people bother with the time-consuming task of separating out the best results from the mountain of not-quite-as-goods into a form that allows convenient perusal. Google again gives us a glimpse of the future: if you dump all of your photos into its cloud now, it generates little slide-shows, supposed highlight reels. The results today are hit and miss, but that will change. Soon an AI will do a credible job of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Then it will make a little extra wheat by editing and combining images to create synthetic scenes that feel right even if they didn’t quite happen, that moment when everyone laughed at the same time (this future is also already here in stunted form, with apps that do this with some laborious handholding). The distance between what happened in a given moment and the content of an image will increase as computational photography grows more ambitious. The idea of a single "exposure" will be displaced by a summarizing of data over time that includes everything, highlight and shadow detail and smiles and everyone who was there, whether they were all in-frame together or not. The result will be a fiction in the service of truth: not only do people not want to take pictures, but they’re more interested in the feel of the moment, the truth of the experience rather than what, on the literal level of atoms and time, actually happened.

I find the images in the Narrative press kit strangely compelling. Here, a family, delirious with joy, is abducted by aliens. They whoop as they are beamed up at sunset into the hovering saucer. The father is rising fastest: it seems that the aliens respect our patriarchy. Of course, Narrative's product could not have captured this image, unless another family member, a less favored cousin perhaps, is looking on with his own Clip 2.

© Narrative

This is the moment when ordinary people stop being photographers and become sensor platforms. That sounds dystopian, but it’s totally appropriate within a restricted context. Most people never wanted to be photographers in the first place. They just wanted those pictures, to help remember what the Grand Canyon looked like or rub their Caribbean vacation in their coworkers’ faces. Which leads to a digression that perfectly illustrates why this is good for the common (wo)man. If you’ve ever been to a Major Site (Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, etc.) you will see people approach to the designated distance, lift a camera or phone in front of their face, and then turn away to find the next Site on their itinerary. There are probably millions of people who have been to the Louvre, stood in front of the Mona Lisa, but have never actually pointed their retinas at the painting. They saw the preview on a screen. Then maybe they posted the picture on Facebook. This is how they take pictures, and this is what they do with them. I’m getting judgy here, but it’s absurd and I feel that it’s bad for people. They are tyrannized by their desire for pictures. Their picture-capture practices have blinded them to what life is for (that is, living). To be a simple platform, to look from alongside rather than through the camera, would be a liberation for them. The limitations of that platform, the human head, will lead to the most distant prediction I’m willing to make.

Not only do people want pictures without necessarily taking them, but they want to be in those pictures. To the extent, it was recently revealed, that they’re willing to balance a phone on a stick held out in front of them to get them. In public. In fact a lot of the folks in the above example have their backs to the Mona Lisa when they preview the image, so the Giaconde can smile over their shoulder in the selfie. The cameras we love have been woeful at addressing this need. Nobody uses self-timers. I guess there are those Casio TR selfie cameras, an apparently isolated bright spot in the market at large that put Casio's camera division in the black for the first time in nine years. We can argue about whether social media is the cause or the effect of this, but I don’t see it changing as long as humans remain descended from small-group-living primates.

The solution: image capture must be physically detached from the subject, the ex-photographer. The solution is a drone, or drones (though they probably won’t be called drones by then, given the distasteful connotations of violent death the word is accruing). Drones already serve as remote controlled cameras, enabling aerial photography in a way that was unimaginable a few years ago. That use case might appeal to a few of “us,” but it will never catch on with normal people. The breakthrough will come when you can pull a drone out of your pocket, toss it into the air, and have it capture imagery of you and your surroundings autonomously. This will be particularly easy if you’re at a Major Site, since there will be millions of suggestions in the cloud, helpfully annotated with more or fewer likes, for the best angles and flight paths. Eventually, even the decision to deploy the drone will be unnecessary, and they will either always be around or will emerge from somewhere when needed. In urban areas a kind of distributed imaging network might complement or even replace these personal swarms, imagers embedded in the environment (which would also have AR applications) that would mesh seamlessly with our forward-facing sensors.

The problem with writing about the future is that if you don't type with your mouse hovering over the "Publish" button, you find yourself writing about the past. This is a picture of the AirSelfie from a press kit that includes five product shots featuring four disembodied hands but zero confirmably attractive people (I could make guesses based on the hands, but guesses are all they would be). However, the hands are identifiable diverse. The product name is terrible but tells the story effectively. As of my present (your past) the AirSelfie's Kickstarter campaign has pulled in over eight times the funding goal.

© AirSelfie Holdings Group

Since I'm now talking about ubiquitous imaging, I'll stipulate that these scenarios require some social changes as well as technological progress. Google Glass was rejected not just by its users, but by everyone else. It freaked people out precisely because it conflated looking and photographing. Hence the media-ballyhooed banning of Glass from a number of restaurants, bars and other private-public places. Many of these businesses had security cameras, but never mind. Despite the fact that we are recorded hundreds of times a day, that we trade the most intimate details of our lives for “free” services, people get nervous about “being photographed.” I’m making this sound crazy partly because it is, and partly to show how easily it could change. In 1950, it was unimaginable that the post office would read every letter it delivered -- that's what Communists did! -- and here we are. Privacy norms are going in one direction, and I don't think we'll have to wait long for mores to embrace truly ubiquitous imaging. There's grisly dystopian potential in that direction, but I'm going to call "beyond the scope" or we'll be here all day.

I readily admit that I may be wrong in the particulars or exact timeline of these predictions, but I'll be surprised if my central thesis is disproved. So where does that leave us? Let's eat dessert first and indulge in some anticipatory nostalgia for the now, before it's gone. Let's be in our moment, appreciate that we're at the apex of a two-hundred-year arc that will fall off abruptly in the near future. And maybe, let's use this time to think about what photography means to us, personally and as a culture, and what we'd like the shape of the thing that replaces it to be.

Paris Photo 2016 Show Report

“Would you rather stew over the fraying of western democracy or soak in a deep pool of fine art photography?” And so I found myself at Paris Photo last week.

The Eye of Mammon shines over Paris Photo. It's much nicer since they moved the show from that subterranean warren under the Louvre to the Grand Palais.

Paris Photo is both a trade show and an art expo. It’s advertised in the metro, on the street, where the unwashed masses can catch wind of it and subsequently attend in an effort to better themselves. But the show’s true raison d’etre is getting galleries together in one place to facilitate the Monopoly-money economics of the fine art world. There are presumably collectors prowling around, collecting, though they are not immediately identifiable. I assume the galleries do some horse trading among themselves as well. Prints are sold for 5,000 or 15,000 or 50,000 euros. You see a lot of bottles of champagne opened: commerce at this scale is thirsty work. This kind of transaction usually happens in rooms where the hoi palloi never tread, so there’s a voyeuristic thrill to be had in rubbing up against it while wearing pants from Old Navy.

Apart from its sheer size and total lack of curatorial unity, this is what sets Paris Photo apart from a museum show: you can stand right next to the great pounding pistons of the machine, tucking in any loose clothing to avoid mangling accident. The hood is off, you feel the thrum of it, see the teeth of gears meshing implacably, shining and smiling hard in the bright daylight-balanced illumination. You hear the ecstatic greetings of near strangers, witness the carefully presented facades of clothes and faces, the leaning close, the parted lips, the excitement of acquisition and being acquired. You sense the invisible flows of currency coursing through the veins and arteries of the show, the fuel that drives this engine for transmuting art into investment.

Attractive people spend their time talking on phones amidst enormous prints. I have been attending Paris Photo for over a decade, and the women who work there never seem to get older. What is their secret? Mammon knows.

I go, not to increase the size of my collection of fine art (which contains not a single object or print, excepting my own), but to bask, to marinate, to steep myself in photography, potentially of excellent quality, and certainly of excellent print quality, especially if you like big prints. There is always art, real art, that resonates in the cockles and subcockles of my heart, shown at Paris Photo. A lot of it is canon, some of it is still damp from the womb, blinking in the bright light, untested.

The photographs hang naked on the freshly erected pre-fab walls, as honest and true as the artists that made them. That is, presumably, of greatly variable honesty and truth. There’s always a fair amount of stuff that does absolutely nothing for me, that I suspect, thought don’t quite have the courage to call out specifically in print, is dross of the most empty and cynical order. I strain to credit my own laziness, my closeted philistinism, for this interpretation, because it is depressing, enraging, to consider that in fact the gatekeepers and taste makers don’t know the difference, or more likely, know but don’t care, that their consideration of the bottom line outweighs all other considerations. If this is the case (and how, in this world, could it not be, at least often?) then I assume the buyers are complicit, more concerned with appreciating investments than appreciating art.

My frustration with the ratio of truth to trash at Paris Photo is offset by my secret delight in the worst work, which allows me to revel in a sense of superiority as I compare it to my own, ignoring for the moment that I am on the outside looking in, that I face the walls rather than face out at thousands of considering, judging eyes. These pieces allow me to indulge in that eternal fantasy of the unappreciated artist: that my work, as easily as some of this stuff, could be anointed, if only I were willing to play the game, dance with the vulpine elegance of gallerists, pander to fashion, etc.

A tilt-shift lens, a snappy suit, and a gold-plated handgun are all useful when attending Paris Photo. Flowers are appropriate for any occasion. I had never seen the rather amazing photo by Sean Hemmerle back there on the left (or had I seen it and forgotten it? In which case there is no hope for me).

Not all of the attendees with artistic aspirations are likely to be so bitter. A disproportionate number are photography students, dutifully toting heavy film cameras and notepads in which they scribble discerningly. I drift through them, vampirically savoring their youthful enthusiasm, stopping up my impulse to condescend, noticing how well their jeans fit. I never speak to them, would not spill the black ink of my cynicism on their clean white pages (they are almost always white). I imagine that they imagine themselves on those walls, that they are taking aim, carefully ignoring statistics, the preponderance of work by photographers who died before they themselves were born, the recurrence of certain names further slimming the room for new entrants. But as with the army of tiny fresh-hatched sea turtles blitzing the beach beneath the wheeling hungry gulls, some tiny percentage will make it. Under such withering fire, luck will play its role alongside ability. Such is the design of things.

The glass ceiling of the Grand Palais reflects the stalls below. If I'd had a tilt-shift lens maybe I could have corrected the perspective distortion evident here. But I didn't, because I don't own one. Ditto a gold-plated handgun.

Despite the nose-bleed elitism that drives Paris Photo, the event also embodies a wholesome democracy. A print that sells for more than a house reflects the same light into my eyes as it would into those of a collector with an exotic credit card. The galleries have staked their claim, merged money and mouth: this is what we have selected, what we think is best. And anyone can praise or piss on their selection (anyone with a disposable 30 euros and a free afternoon, anyway). For a few short days a year, the cards are all on the table. Then they’re folded back into dark, deep pockets.

Galleries are contractually obligated to use only information technology sourced from Apple. This is not true, but the show seems to exist in a pocket universe where the PC and Android never happened.

Anyway, this year I saw some cool photography, familiar and not. I might mention it in another post. Also, a lot of people were carrying neat old cameras, which was fun to see. You’d think film never went out of style. BMW is still a sponsor, and JP Morgan attached its name and apparently lent out some photographs from its collection. Money and cars: the link to photography is oblique, but I believe it is there. Leica had a little pavilion where I saw the new TL, mated absurdly to the already absurd new-old 28mm Summaron. In its glass case under LED spotlighting, perhaps bathed in an inert argon atmosphere, the TL looked impossibly clean, too pristine for this world. I did not particularly yearn to profane it with my touch: it seemed distant, an idol once worshiped by a long-disappeared alien race.

This might actually be the T rather than the TL, not that it matters. The camera will join the digital junk stream in the near future, but the lens will live on, hopefully taking wide angle views in bright light but probably sitting mintily in a cabinet.

The Future of Photography Has No Cameras or Photographers (Part 1)

I'm 39 years old, and I believe I will live to see the death of the camera as we know it today. A 10-year-old granddaughter will open a cupboard without my permission, irritating me, and ask, "What are these?"

I will sigh and say, "Those are cameras."

The insufficiency of this answer will be plain on her face.

"They're for taking pictures," I will add.

And she will look at me, puzzled, because the idea of a hulking thing that takes pictures just won't make sense to a young mind in that far-off year (I'm assuming, as one does, that I'll live to the optimistic side of the actuarial curve).

Today’s digital cameras are descended with astounding directness from the very first boxes with a lens to focus light onto a photo-sensitive surface. The basics were set down in a time before practical electric light, before powered flight, before a 25th territory joined the United States. Along the way it got easier to see what would be in the frame, and now cameras automatically expose and focus under a wide range of lighting conditions, and we don't need to develop film. That’s the 1820s up until the last few years, when cameras (in phones) became networked devices, which just means that nearly everyone on the planet can see our pictures right away. Which is progress, I suppose.

128 years separate these cameras. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. In the distant future archeologists will consider the stratum in which they are buried and marvel at the brief moment of its thinness. The broken camera stratum will overlap slightly with the horse bone stratum, and archeologists may wonder if cameras somehow killed off the once-ubiquitous quadrupeds.

Original Kodak Camera by National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution, CC attribution noncommercial, Nikon D5 by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC attribution

Here's the thing that the camera, in its march towards automation and better image quality, has been studiously ignoring for 200 years: most people don't want to take pictures. They want to have pictures. Of course, by "most people" (as is so often the case) I don't mean you and me. I mean everyone else. People who don't read essays about cameras. Many of them have been deserting the camera market in droves because their phones do a bang-up job of taking pictures, and the younger ones have probably never owned what we’d consider a camera at all. Or a telephone without a camera in it, for that matter.

What's really critical for us, though, is how many of them do still buy real cameras. Yes, they do, in the often mistaken belief that their phone isn't good enough. We depend on them, because there aren't really enough of us to drive a major global industry. But they aren't going to be around for us to kick much longer.

Like many things that can be successfully “predicted,” the agent of change is already here, but in a form that masks its significance. I believe that Google Glass-style augmented reality (AR) will become a thing in my lifetime. The technology will surpass the Google Glass quasi-prototype inflicted on us in 2013, by not being ugly and useless. I don't know exactly how it will work or what it will look like, but an army of beavering engineers (at Google, Apple, or somewhere we haven't heard of yet) will figure it out. Smartphones are already acting as prosthetic memories, and moving artificial intelligence up to eye-level will be the proverbial no-brainer when it can be done practically.

Did you know that Nokia was selling internet-connected phones in the 1990s? A few people loved them, but statistically, no one bought them. They were smart, but only relatively, a revolutionary idea that predated the technology necessary to make it practical (and the constellation of services that would make it desirable). Eventually more device makers piled onto the idea, but none really got it right. Readers of the technology press might remember feverish discussions of "convergence" as companies were trying to blend a pocket computer (then quaintly known as a "personal digital assistant," or PDA) with a cell phone. The results generally stumbled on both fronts, so badly that some industry observers, myself included, wondered what the point was. Why not have a nice little phone, and a nice PDA? Aren't we all men who wear pants with pockets? I was less enlightened and less perceptive back then, and perhaps not coincidentally I routinely wore cargo pants (and cargo shorts).

When the future arrives, it's ugly and doesn't work very well. Technology is a strange race where coming in first place often means becoming a historical footnote. Someone farther back watches the fastest runners cross the finish line, stagger to a stop and look around, panting and confused by the lack of cheering.

Nokia 9110 by Eirik Solheim, CC attribution sharealike, Google Glass by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC attribution (Also known for his stirring portraits of DSLRs -- weird that searching Flickr with unrelated terms, I picked two photos by the same guy.)

The defining consumer technology concept of this young century took off suddenly in 2007 when a maker of portable music players and expensive computers decided to shake the game up. By then I was wearing jeans with restricted pocket real estate, and was ready for the shift. Now only a few nerds and early-adopting business people remember the modern smartphone’s underwhelming, unpromising origins in those Nokia devices of the preceding century.

We're straying from cameras here, but bear with me. Google Glass is the smartphone at the turn of the millennium, looking like a half-baked solution in search of a problem. But our reality will be augmented eventually, because we (a more inclusive "we" that embraces us and them) are lazy and want all the help we can get processing the world, and because we hate to be alone with our thoughts. And the artificial intelligence we currently tap through our phones will need to see what we see in order to understand our needs before we do, which means some kind of imager will see everything we see. And boom, that will be the end of cameras, and of photography, as we know it.

Today we might praise a camera by saying that it functions "as an extension of the eye," but this is only a figure of speech. A true extension of the eye would need to be something that lives on your face, where your eyes are, and where an AR imager will be.

Perhaps, in the very beginnings of the AR moment, our imager might work like the crude camera on the first-gen Google Glass, which took a picture when you pressed a button on the frame or, god help us, said "OK Glass, take a picture" out loud. The engineers will do better than that -- remember, it took a while to figure out the touch screen. In the beginning, miniaturization will probably carry a penalty in terms of image quality, as with early phone cameras. But as happened with phones, the quality will eventually be good enough for most people.

At that point, most people, the huge majority, will never think about cameras again. The consumer market for dedicated cameras will end its long retraction with a final collapse. Today, there are conservatively half-a-dozen international companies competing fiercely for the serious consumer camera market. Some of them might remain in the professional image capture business: people’s everyday AR solution won't be suitable for billboard-sized advertising, and barring a cataclysm with few other upsides, the foreseeable future definitely includes advertising. But the days of deep-pocketed innovation in the consumer camera space will be over. The camera will be a backwater, niche object, perhaps a useful shorthand for indicating an era in fiction, and that is what I mean by the end of cameras as we know them.

This guy wants to be thinking about his camera. He is not like most people.

This is a not, I swear, a cautionary tale. It's prediction, not proscription. If you detect a note of approbation in this essay, it's probably my precocious grumpy-old-man-ness. I am interested in cameras for their own sake, I find the course of their technological development exciting, and I can see from where I'm standing the end of their story as objects that we, as a culture, care about. Boo hoo. I'm not overly worried about humanity lacking objects to care about.

With the collapse of the consumer gear industry, there will be no ads in glossy magazines (probably no magazines at all by that point anyway), no constellation of websites lapping at Amazon's referral fees. The camera fandom we have today, which has little to nothing to do with photography but is still a source of satisfaction and belonging for its members, will cease to exist. Of course, that makes it sound like the rug will be yanked out from under it, as if a revered television series were canceled mid-season, a bustling forum suddenly knocked offline. Indeed, it may feel like that for the few of us who remain, but our upraised voices will be drowned in a sea of indifference. By then a lot of us will be dead, and the rest old, and the people who come after us might understand that cameras were once a thing, and they might not, but the world will have new things on its mind, like stylish personal flotation devices to deal with the rising oceans.

Stay tuned for the next installment, in which I explain how photographers will follow cameras into the void.

Leica: The Unreasonable Choice

I wrote the following over a year ago, before I plunged into the madness.

---

Shhhhh. Just look at it.

Why do I want a Leica M film camera? Honestly, I'm asking you, because I can't figure it out. I'm basically a digital native photographer: although I grew up in the last years of film's supremacy, I didn't get seriously into picture making until I bought a Canon digital point-and-shoot in 2004. From there, I followed the familiar camera-DSLR-mirrorless trajectory. At each step, the image quality got better, the cameras got more responsive. Now, with an Olympus OMD E-M10 as my daily driver, I'm far more likely to not see a shot than blow it because the camera couldn't.

And yet. A mechanical Leica. Apparently, now I want a camera that costs money every time I release the shutter, that requires me to focus manually with the camera mashed against my face, not to mention set aperture AND shutter speed on my own (and since I'm looking at fully mechanical bodies, doesn’t even suggest what those settings should be), that needs to be disassembled after taking 36 frames (and forces me, right then, to decide what the ISO will be for the next 36). Also, it's heavier than my current kit. And it costs more. What the hell am I thinking?

Whatever it is, I think it's been percolating for a while. From time to time over the last several years, I've started looking at metal-bodied SLRs on eBay before deciding I was just being silly. I had a lot of fun researching obscure lenses that might work on my NEX 5N (I once blew a whole night learning about Exakta-mount lenses) and I enjoyed using the old Olympus 38mm Pen half-frame lens that I bought from someone in Japan. Sure, it was a great performer above f2, but I really liked the mechanical solidity of it, a dense metal knuckle with a focus ring that felt good against the fingers compared to the plasticy stuff I was used to. I’ve long been interested in what I refer to in my head (though not, generally, out loud) as “knob feel” – the tactility of control surfaces. One of the main reasons I bought the E-M10 over the contemporaneous Panasonic GX7 was knob feel: the Panasonic’s control wheels had an unsatisfying clicky movement that I couldn’t abide. But a fine mechanical camera has knob feel all its own. The knobs and wheels and rings actually do something – they aren’t the disconnected surface of a virtual machine but physically linked to their purpose. This changes the way they feel, both in the fingers and in the mind.

Olympus F. Zuiko Auto-S 38mm f1.8 Pen system lens

So metal. At first it was just for fun. Then just when I needed it. Then I needed it every day.

And speaking of mind, I took a pleasure in that old half-frame lens that was entirely apart from its functional qualities, something more poetic than practical. What light had already passed through its glass? Whose fingers had focused it? Imagining the answers to these questions somehow enriched my experience of using the lens. And what stirs imaginings more than a Leica?

Then there’s the harder-to-admit part. The credence in legend. The illusory connection to a tradition that encompasses some of the greatest practitioners of photography we have known. The ridiculous but irresistible sense of aligning one’s self with genius through the tools used by geniuses. Is there a pathos in this, an admission that I have not produced immortal greatness with the best tools of my day, and so I retreat to tools proven in another age? Well, let’s look out rather than in.

© Henri Cartier-Bresson | Magnum Photos

I have never seen like this. I will never see like this. I fill this sadness with objects.

Then there’s the soft Neo-Luddism that permeates our moment, with our reactionary gaze towards the vintage and authentic. Do I entertain ideas about how digital abundance erodes the thought I put into each frame? Do I harbor fantasies that shooting film will force me to contemplate, slow down, consider, and perhaps see more clearly? Do I imagine that each image will be more precious, will be imbued with some quality that is otherwise sacrificed to digital disposability? I confess, this does seem to be the case.

Now, you might reasonably suggest that there are less torturous ways of dabbling in film and old cameras than joining a cult whose demands are as onerous as Leicaism. And I would retort that, first off, I've tried other mechanical cameras and they didn't do it for me, knob-feel-wise. And second, la la la, I can’t hear you. I don’t want a reasonable camera. I want one that satisfies my unreasonable hungers, that sings silently over the sadnesses of the everyday.

Found, Lost, Found

Every passionate photographer has an origin story. There is an image, a camera, a path-changing encounter. A victorious note resonates even if the urge to photograph is born of loss: because of that, here I am, doing something meaningful.

People are less likely to talk about how they stopped making pictures. For the serial artist, it might be an urge to explore a new medium. For those who come to photography primarily through a passion for cameras, it can be as simple as losing interest in the gear, finding a new class of object to study and acquire. But for some, like me, there is no decision. I still wanted that snap of recognition when a scene ripe for seizure pops out of the world. It just wasn’t happening.

"The girls were referred to as 'notetakers' in Professor Crispin's contract."

A favorite from 2007. Stuff like this rained out of the sky. Until it didn't.

I first saw photography, as child in the 1980s, as a kind of magic: the power to make a moment reappear after the fact. But the trick gets old quickly, and almost immediately my interest shifted to cameras themselves, the embodiment of the magic. I loved their mechanical perfection, and the way I could atomize the world through the viewfinder, picking and choosing what to see. The pictures I made were a cool side effect of manipulating controls, framing scenes, releasing the shutter.

A little later in life, when I was old enough to recognize that nothing lasts and that memory is porous, I embraced photography as a way to bookmark moments I might otherwise lose.

But it wasn’t until my mid-twenties, when digital photography became accessible, that I found the freedom to really experiment with a camera and use it as a tool to explore the world, and maybe, to make art. I still loved cameras themselves, the perfect thingness of them, in a way that’s both irrational and unnecessary to explain to many people reading this. But I also began to feel my life shifting under the influence of photography as a practice. My way of seeing, tightly bound to ways thinking and being, became intimately linked to photography.

My main mode was street photography. I had recently moved to Paris. I carried a camera all the time. I shot a lot. I posted a photo every day on my blog on the pre-social web. I considered myself an amateur in the Frencher, non-diminutive sense of the word. And so passed six happy years.

"Lucy's outfits had to match her route to work."

And then something happened, or rather, stopped happening. I can’t pin down a moment. I was still carrying a camera all the time (by then, a fairly heavy DSLR). But I was barely taking pictures, outside of the life-documentary role that I’d assumed in my circle because I was the one who bothered to lug around a camera. I had stopped seeing the moments that I’d caught so often before. After months of this, I gave up carrying the full-sized camera and got an “enthusiast compact” (that revolution was just starting). It stayed stubbornly in my pocket.

Living in Paris, I couldn’t blame a lack of subject. The transitory tableaux of people, trash on the sidewalk, odd alignments and coincidences, the stuff that changes minute to minute and never repeats, has sustained many photographers over the course of a lifetime. Paris basically looked at me over the rim of her wine glass and said, "It's not me, baby. It's you." When people asked why I’d abandoned my blog, I had to admit: I’d just stopped seeing pictures.

I’m more a believer in the “perspiration” than the “inspiration” school of creative endeavor. But when it comes to photography, what constitutes perspiration? To the extent that I’d considered it at all, I would probably have told you that carrying a camera and keeping your eyes open were enough. Now, I can attest that they are not. Something else, probably involving attention and intention, has to be going on as well, but I haven’t been able to break it down. All I know is that I couldn’t decide to do it, and without it, I was sweating for nothing.

I was afraid that this blindness might signal a more profound problem. Was I getting too jaded, or too distracted, to connect with the world? Was stagnation in other parts of my life stopping up my creative flow? Introspection didn’t yield a definitive answer.

One thing I could safely rule out was gear boredom. The serious little compact I'd bought never quite felt like a real camera, and I ended up trading in the SLR for a much lighter mirrorless body. Despite the fact that the new camera was better in every way than the DSLR (apart from the tactility) I only used it for documenting the basics of life and pretty vacation shots. Very occasionally I'd see something like before, but those brief flashes only emphasized the prevailing darkness.

Sometimes a shot would still walk up and slap me in the face, but usually it was a pretty obvious one. Who would miss this?

The drought lasted about three years. I moved to a new apartment in Paris. I traveled. I worked, and didn’t, as circumstance allowed. Then my daughter was born. I took the obligatory baby pictures for her introductory months of life, at first, often with my phone. But something in me balked at poking a virtual shutter button and I limbered up the sadly neglected mirrorless camera. I began taking it out to document her in the stroller as we jaunted around town. I'd never bothered to buy anything more interesting than the kit lens, so I started to use an old manual prime I had left over from my SLR, the laborious focusing perfect for portraits of a baby who couldn’t do much more than stare back at me.

And just as inexplicably as when I'd been cut off, Paris started answering my calls. I saw things. I shot them. Pretty much like before. It's been over two years, so I don't think it's a flash in the pan.

"When it came to the ladies, Steve knew it was all about the approach."

Then I was back on the horse.

It’s tempting to think that the birth of my child was the spark that relit my vision, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It was about five months after she arrived that things changed. Maybe it took that long to recover from the shock and exhaustion of those first baby-caring days, but I don’t think so.

Ultimately, I don’t know why my vision deserted me, and I don’t know why it came back. But I know that when I lost it, it felt like a failing, and permanent. I write this so that a reader experiencing a similar loss will know that a pause, an extended rest in the symphony of your photography, doesn’t always mean the music is over.

the return of PartialSight

A select and fortunate few experienced my last presocial photo blog, PartialSight. That blog has crumbled into the jungle of abandoned Pixelpost sites, creepers overgrowing its CSS, visible only in orbital lidar scans. But the domain survived, a $15-per-year leech I never worked up the courage to pull off a sensitive place, and it now points here. For a stream of my public photography efforts, check out my Tumblr, dotfield. For words that don't fit anywhere else, read here.