The Fotographer: Gerald Figal
After years of touting the benefits of digital photography and teasing my wife Sara — a far more experienced film photographer than I — about how I could produce hundreds of images to her dozen in less time and with less cost, I loaded my late father's black Bakelite Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera ($5.95 in 1962, the year of my birth) with a roll of 120 film one day simply to see what would happen if I actually tried to use the dusty old thing. It produced some interesting pictures. So, I decided to take it apart and clean it up. In the meantime, I had my mother try to find Dad's old Yashica Mat 124G, but alas it had disappeared. I bought one on eBay instead. It take fantastic photos and is my go-to 'normal' medium format camera. Somehow, I also began to explore pinhole cameras — another medium my wife has far more experience with — and built one, and then two, and then three of various sizes for use primarily with photo paper to make paper negatives. But why not make a pinhole camera for film as well? And so I made one out of an empty iPhone 3GS box. It magically takes magical photos, such as the one of me at the left. Most recently I built The ETC (EveryThingCam), a clunky bellows-based 4x5 camera that can be fitted with a shutter for pinholes or fitted with just about any old lens I can find.
This interest in vintage lens and pinhole cameras thus began innocently enough. It then snowballed into acquiring a wide variety cameras that were somehow historically representative of a particular period type and/or format. None are particularly rare (= expensive and collectible), but each has its own character and that's what I like about them. The oldest (a Seneca 6b 4x5 view camera) dates from about 1910 and the youngest (a Pentax MG that serves as my lightweight go-to point-and-shoot 35mm) dates from the early 1980s. The one Big Exception is my toy 35mm twin lens reflex, the Gakkenflex that came as a DIY die-cut plastic kit in the November 2009 issue of the Japanese magazine, Otona no kagaku (Science for Adults). It's my substitute for the far-too-popular Holga and figures prominently when I'm seeking to capture scenes of urban decay....