image from a Diana-mini Lomo camera
A couple of years ago Lomo cameras were very very cool. Extremely cheap, made in Russia, plastic with multiple lenses, they took ghastly uncontrollable photographs with light flares, strange colour and much accidental focussing. The multiple lens version took four photos a fraction of a second apart in the same frame -- the photos are brilliant, everything is marginal.
The Holga was first made in 1982 in Hong Kong and uses 120 film. You can move the film back and forth manually a bit at a time, getting multiple and overlapping exposures.
The name LOMO comes from a former USSR optics manufacturer that made clear plastic lenses and inexpensive cameras. In 1991 the Lomo was picked up by an Austrian photographic company, and Lomos are now made in China: the fall of the Soviet Union, the privatisation of optical technology and outsourcing to China in a brief few years. Holga is an acronym cobbled together from Hong Kong and something else. Couldn't really understand it.
Everyone can mess around with images in Photoshop, but that's no fun. It's like pretending to make art. Perhaps our delight in accidental photos, whether made by a Lomo or found on the street is precisely because we didn't do them. Our only act is to choose the ones we find provocative.
a Holga panorama made by advancing and rewinding the film manuallyThe downside is that the film has to be processed and it is increasingly difficult to find shops with the quick turnaround we all once took for granted. My last roll of Kodachrome had to be sent to some place in Kansas – Ed's Photos or some such unprepossessing name – the only Kodachrome processor in North America. No wonder it's history. I suppose we could all dig out our old trays and enlargers and manuals on how to develop film, scrape around to find a source of the chemicals, build new darkrooms and get on with it. Then it would get serious.