camera

they've always been pretty. i've always wanted them, but it wasn't until i lived in michigan near the original argus factory that the longing for some cameras became an almost physical presence. i bought an old argus c-3 at a thrift store and wandered around ann arbor snapping photos like i knew what i was doing. i liked the range finder. i thought it made me fancy. what i found out was that men who'd just missed going to war in ww2 would run up to me on the street nearly in tears screaming, "is that a brick?" they would start in without waiting for my answer, telling my my camera was by far the most beautiful, brilliant, perfect camera on the face of the earth and nobody better ever say otherwise. i could see in their faces they were already somewhere else, sometime else, and they would rattle on about the camera, their own version of the camera, and how it had made their lives beautiful. it happened over and over. they had grown up there, right by the factory, fallen in love in their own hometowns with this camera.

over the years the sweetie and i have collected a pile of about fifty mostly useless old still cameras and not quite a dozen movie cameras of all sorts. the ones we can scrounge film for we've used, but even the useless ones are too pretty to toss and they sit on shelves or tables, challenging me to dust them.

so when my class started a nonfiction unit i decided to do something selfish. i decided to talk about what i like, what i think is pretty, what makes me happy. we start the unit talking about a thing (any thing will do) and we talk about all the different ways to approach it. lists, diagrams, instructions, personal stories, timelines, etc. so i dragged in as many cameras as i could carry and a photo album. it is a scary thing to toss what you love out onto a bunch of fourteen year olds, especially if what you love includes photos you've taken your own self in an attempt to be "artistic" or if it involves giving them anything older than your grandma.

here's what i took:
brownie flash 620, complete with flash apparatus
polariod land camera, 800 series (it weighs a thousand pounds!)
argus a series camera, with dreamy art deco back and rounded front
polaroaid j66 land camera with color coded levers and buttons to match instructions on the back
kodak brownie 2a (early 30s)
unlabeled camera with spring-loaded bellows
kodak brownie starmatic (this is the not oldest one, right?)
kodak jr 1-a autographic (1914-1927) with "old timey" writing and a collapsing bellows
argus 75 with a shaded viewfinder
a newish wooden pinhole camera made by robert rigby and fitted with a polaroid back

nothing rare. nothing fancy. nothing very valuable to anyone but me. i put the kids in groups and put cameras on the tables. here are the rules: do not get up from your table with a camera. hold cameras by the heaviest part. do not force anything to open, close or slide. if you hurt the camera, you get me another of that kind. here are the instructions: look at them. pick them up. figure them out. if you have never watched a group of teenagers try to figure out how to cram the bellows back into the body of a 90 year old camera, you should try it. it will make your hands shake. they held the little clouded viewfinders up to their eyes and couldn't see a thing. they pushed buttons and advanced film. one of the cameras, i think the brownie 620, had film in it when i bought it and they might or might not have taken some photos and might or might not have then exposed the whole roll. either way, one group cheerfully handed me a roll of color processed c-22 film which hasn't been made since 1977. they got the backs off every camera and each time were shocked to find the spaces empty of machinery. they smelled them, felt the outsides, touched the bellows. they figured out viewfinders accidentally while passing cameras across the table to each other.

i have never had a teaching day with more questions. the how of real live cameras was too much for them. they wanted ages, dates, kinds of film. i told them about the c-3 and they want to see it. i explained the idea of a camera obscura and they are looking for a good room to make one. they want to make a classroom sized camera. i guess maybe my favorite part was telling them they could be inside a camera and watching their eyes.

we looked at a photo album all from the pinhole camera. they liked the photos just fine but wanted to see them again when they realized there's no viewfinder, no lens, no stuff. "how do you know what you're taking a picture of?" the kept asking. "you guess," i said, "and that's the nice part, that's what makes it an adventure." to my complete surprise, they agreed.