Cheesy Cameras

Cheesy Cameras...
Toys? Tools? Or Just Cheese?

Beats me! I started playin' around with "alternatative" cameras some time back, aided and encouraged by information painstakingly gleaned by the acknowledged queen of Junk Store Cameras, Marcy Merrill. (Go checkout Marcy's work with Altoid tins!?) It started innocently enough - stories like this always do, you know - next thing you know, I'm camped out on eBay or wandering the "antique malls", trying to pick up another, even junkier, fuzzier camera to play with. This, children, is a dreadful disease for which there is no known cure.

I carry a couple of Holgas and an Empire Baby, sometimes a WOOZYCAM® with me nearly all the time. On a recent trip to San Francisco, I left behind all vestiges of modern photographic technology - no digital cameras, no Nikons - just Holgas and Empire Babies. Extremely liberating aesthetically, but it requires a bit more advance planning - you can't just waltz into Walgreen on Market Street and grab a roll of 127 black and white film - you need Film For Classics.

Why Cheese?

Maybe it's a knee jerk reaction to all the technology in commercial photography today, or maybe it's an attempt to get back to the simplest form of photography - that thing that brings us to the edge of screwing up a perfectly good hobby by going into business for ourselves - either way, the simple, primitive cameras have a way of humbling you and making you remember what it felt like the first time you saw a print come up in the developer. The other possibility is that Cheesy Cameras give us an excuse for D.W.A. - Deductible Work Avoidance.

There are few, if any, controls on most of these cameras. The finished photographic product is very much an amalgam of luck, practice, and karmic payback. The best way to approach these cameras is with a smile on your face - they can smell fear - and a huge roll of gaffer's tape. Most of them leak light like a screen door.

The Holga	Empire Baby	Traveler 120
Imperial Delta 127	Empire Scout	Fed-Flash
Sunbeam	Genos Rapid	Herco Imperial Snap Shot
Meteor	Lessons from The Champ	Ansco Shur-Flash 120
Halina 6-4	Photomaster	Babette, Queen of Cheese
CLIX Magic Lens Camera	The WOOZYCAM®	The Namco
	Brownies