Shooting from and by the hip: Lomography finds a toehold on the Mall
By Jennifer LaRue Huget,
It’s a curious way to capture Washington’s monuments — shooting from the hip on a role of film that’s past its expiration date with the kind of rudimentary camera that used to be sold for a few dollars.
But the lomography movement — nurtured in European and Asian capitals since the International Lomographic Society was formed in Vienna in 1992 — has established a toehold here on the Mall, where a small number of practitioners choose pinhole Polaroids and Dianas over digital cameras and smartphones to create shots of the nation’s capital. Among them one recent Saturday were Christian Meade, 25, an art handler and assistant in an antiques gallery in Alexandria; Alexis Lodsun, 19, of Arlington, a sophomore photography student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia; and Brian Mishoe, 42, of Frederick, who works in the marketing department at George Washington University.
Residing at the intersection of found art, vacation snapshots and documentary photography, lomography is for most a hobby that doesn’t aspire to be “art” of the kind being celebrated this week at the fourth annual Foto Week DC. Many lomographers say they are motivated by a desire to recapture a photographic feeling from the past.
“I think we’re nostalgic for something we didn’t have,” Meade says. “Kids who don’t remember it and want to bring it back” are fueling the movement, Lodsun suggests. “Or they see pictures of themselves as kids” and want to re-create that mood, offers Mishoe.
People have been shooting with plastic cameras such as the Diana and Holga models made in China in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, for decades. Countless photographers — professional and amateur — have cut their teeth and refined their technique by using instruments originally produced as “toy” cameras. The standard 120 format, 60mm film produces square photos that have become emblematic of the lomo style, though many shoot with 35mm film, with images extending to the edges of the film strip to include the sprocket holes running along the sides.
But even defining lomography depends on who’s doing the defining. The name? Derived from the low-tech Russian Lomo Kompakt Automat camera used by the hipsters who started the movement. And the basics? Lomographers typically use cameras made mostly of plastic — including the lens — whose construction and metrics allow for the often inadvertent creation of haunting images. Light leaks, limited capacity to focus and adjust apertures and a cavalier approach to shooting set lomographic images aside from more carefully crafted and exacting digital photos.
Lomography — at least as viewed by the lomographic society — is loosely governed by 10 rules, the last of which is “Don’t worry about any rules.” Lomographers are encouraged to carry their cameras with them always and to shoot all the time, to experiment with shooting from the hip without using the viewfinder, to work fast and not to think too much. Rules 8 and 9 read as follows: “You don’t have to know beforehand what you’ve captured on film . . . and you don’t necessarily have to know afterwards, either” — the antithesis of digital, display-screen-governed photography.
For the record, you can achieve lomography-like images via smartphone apps such as Hipstamatic and Instagram. As to whether those apps are sufficiently satisfying, that’s a matter of personal taste.
Lodsun says: “I use Instagram every day. It has no artistic quality.”
In the United States, lomography is centered largely in New York and California, where the Lomographic Society operates stores selling cameras, specialty films and all manner of accessories meant to enhance the lomography experience. A basic Diana camera runs about $60 at the New York store. You can walk into any Urban Outfitters store and snag a lomo camera for about the same price.
Near the Washington Monument, Meade props his Polaroid 360 Land camera, whose bellows he has replaced with a box wrapped in black duct tape and whose aperture is simple pinhole covered with a strip of tape that he peels away when he’s ready to record an image, on a wall, aimed at a busy sidewalk. He moves his lips as he counts out the exposure. A few minutes later he reveals his image, in which the mass of people has mysteriously disappeared, their movement obscuring their presence.
Mishoe lifts his tripod high and pulls the chain that activates his camera, whose swift spin captures a 360-degree panoramic image. Lodsun shoots constantly with one camera or another as she walks, sometimes shooting without benefit of the viewfinder.
People stare and stop to ask questions. A group of Asian men cease their own photography to watch this trio pose for the pinhole in front of the Capitol. A brisk-walking man stops to chat, saying he remembers such cameras “from Cub Scouts” before suggesting that the photographers stop by the monument to the pioneering 19th-century photographer Louis Daguerre outside of the National Portrait Gallery.
But not all who shoot with film embrace lomography. Lodsun says the “snooty kids” at school shun it, for instance. And Yuriy Zahvoyskyy, a professional photographer from Silver Spring, talks with some skepticism about the trend.
“I love film,” he wrote in an e-mail. “You can hold on to it. You know it’s there for you, on a shelf in a sleeve.” But “Lomo is just making a lot of money on newbies,” Zahvoyskyy continued. “They call it art. Well, I think it’s just a business. They know how to sell $2.99 worth of camera for $50. [They] won’t tell you that if you have a Pro Film camera and you put some dirt and dust on the lens, don’t focus, don’t make a proper exposure, using the wrong film speed, you will get a pretty similar result to what you get with lomo cameras.”
Lodsun, Meade and Mishoe wouldn’t necessarily disagree. Still, they say, lomography helps them look at the world in a different way.
“What other people kind of see out of the corner of their eye,” Mishoe says, “we see as a picture.”
Huget is a freelance writer.