Lomography

 

Moving on from yesterday's post about Lo-Fi audio and music to Lo-Fi image making. Lomography is by now an established movement in photography, using usually cheap and nasty film cameras to produce images that have what would have been previously considered faults such as image and colour distortions; akin to the noise and distortion of Lo-Fi audio gear: the beauty being in the unpredictable nature of the resulting images just as it is with sounds produced on old gear.

It all started back in 1992 in Vienna, with a bunch of students and the Lomo LC-A camera; a Russian device of dubious quality that was essentially a cheap knock-off of a Cosina CX-1. The nature of its poor optics meant that images were oddly coloured and often soft-focussed [read: blurred], but rather than considering these images flawed, the group took their visual eccentricities and ran with them to produce their own brand of photography. As with the Japanese Provoke group of the '60's, which I've mentioned before, they pushed the envelope of the photographic aesthetic to achieve something fresh and new.

The movement became a company: Lomographische AG, but the spirit of the original movement is kept alive by experimenters and analogue fiends the world over. These days, you can get film stock that was intended for radically different original purposes; X-Ray film for example, in useable formats such as 35mm that will produce unexpected results even in normal film cameras, let alone when put through one of the cheap plastic things that started it all nearly thirty years ago. The key is experimentation, embracing the unexpected and going with the odd. What's not to like? Very Zen, in my book.