Opinion: From a 16-lens wonder to a brick-like beast designed by Stalin’s favorite weapon designer, these are the weirdest cameras from my huge collection.
I’ve been collecting cameras for half a century now, but a few years ago decided it was time to finally take them off the shelves and start actually using them. In January 2010, I decided to use a different film camera every week, aiming to get through 52 in the year. Well, things got a little out of hand and the project – which you can follow on my Flickr page – ended up lasting a decade. I never missed a week, which means I’ve now used 522 different cameras. Many of my cameras are fairly common or cheap, including the likes of Olympus Trips and Box Brownies. But I’ve picked up a lot of oddities along the way too, and the ones below are a selection of the more unusual ones in my collection. Hailing from all over the world, these cameras are a cross-section of the huge variety you could find in the earlier days of film (and still can, if you’re prepared to hunt around). As well as an interest in old cameras, I have a degree in Fine Art, and like to think that the creative element of the project is as important as its technical aspects. Of course, it’s now several years since consumer digital cameras have out-performed film cameras in terms of technical quality. But this has freed film cameras to be used for the sheer joy of tinkering with analogue devices, and in creative ways where a perfect image is no longer an important criterion for success. So here, in no particular order, are the 12 most gloriously strange cameras I own. Cast your mind back five years and you might remember a bizarre digital camera with 16 lenses, called the Lytro L16. Well, the Kalimar Action Shot is a similar concept from an entirely different era. It’s one of those rare cameras that I previously hadn’t heard of, but as soon as I became aware of its existence I knew I had to have one. Hitting the market just before video cameras started to get affordable, this gadget was marketed at golfers to help them analyze their swing. It has 16 lenses, arranged to cover two full frames on a 35mm film. The shutters are fired in rapid sequence, and the resulting prints show the progress of the golfer’s arm and club. The appeal to me was not so much the rapid sequences, but the fact that the camera also has a setting allowing the shutters to be fired one at a time, as close or as far apart as you want. This opens up possibilities of creating a mini narrative series or making in-camera ‚joiner‘ photos like the one above of Marc Quinn’s giant baby. The selfie camera has been standard on smartphones for years now, but this camera was way ahead of its time when it landed in 1983. It uses the now-obsolete disc film format, and is in most respects just like the hundreds of little disc cameras that were around at the time. What sets the Minolta 7 Disc apart from the rest, though, is its built-in telescopic wand (as Minolta called it), which we’d now call a selfie stick. This allows the camera to be held at arm’s length while you pose yourself with the aid of a convex mirror, which is part of the camera. The camera’s shutter release is in the handle, and a motor-drive advances the film to the next frame if you want to take more than one snap. The main disadvantage with disc cameras is that the film was last made in 1999, and the dwindling supply is ever more expired. Couple that with the fact that the battery is not replaceable, and this becomes more a collector’s curiosity than a usable camera, although I did take a few selfies with it during lockdown. Remember the View-Master? Like a 1950s precursor to Google Cardboard, these binocular-like devices created the illusion of 3D depth thanks to their little discs containing stereo pairs of photos. What fewer people realize is that there were also a number of cameras made for enthusiastic amateurs to take their own View-Master stereo photos, and I have one of these. First introduced at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, there was a wealth of content made for View-Masters, everything from wildlife to comedy cartoons and risqué pin-ups. But the camera I have is the Mark II version, made in 1962. As ever, I was as taken by the camera’s quirks and possibilities as much as by its functionality. The film takes a diagonal path across the camera, and this allows an amazing 75 stereo pairs, or 150 ‚chips‘ as the manufacturer described them, to be made out of a 36 exposure film. I sometimes like to extend my compositions beyond the frame of the negative, and the staggered, angled images, edged by the film’s sprocket holes and bar-codes, can work well given a suitable subject. This piece of Soviet-era kit comes in a distinctly military-looking metal case, weighing in at over 5kg.
