When We Were Diddled…

Don’t be startled by the header – I mean when we, as photographers, were given the old run-around. When we were harvested like over-ripe plums. When we were subject to someone’s stupidity, cupidity, or morbidity. And lived to tell about it.

a. The Technicolor camera

I am probably remembering the wrong name but I am certain about the camera – it was a white-coloured diecast camera body with a silvered lens mount and a simplified control layout. The thing itself was a glorified point and shoot from the film era but the hook on it was that it took a specially-spooled 35mm film canister that was to be supplied by one firm who also did the processing. I suspect it was from the USA – it had that 50’s look about it. Needless to say, the cameras that escaped from the cage and purchased by suckers were very soon out of film and the firm was very soon out of business.

b. Lomo

Whether you think Lomo, or Diana, or Holga or any other toy camera make and whether it is from British Hong Kong, Chinese Hong Kong, or Russian Hong Kong, you are dealing with a propaganda machine – not a camera maker.

I do not decry plastic cameras – you can have all the Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty cameras you like. Indeed the old film Kodaks that were made of plastic like the Starflashes and Starmites were actually quite successful. They were sturdy and they worked  – giving us images that were about as good as the Lomo ones. And the various iterations of Kodapak 126 cartridge cameras could be everything from basic to fabulous. But they were trying to do a job on film, not on flannel.

The ability to sell the sizzle, not the bacon, comes naturally to the Russians, as they have been selling political lard of some form for the last century. They were successful in a lot of places – not their own country, mind, but then they are familiar with their own methods and a bit wary. But the Lomo even exceeded the failure rate of the average Soviet five-year plan – it failed to even deliver the sizzle. The advertising that accompanied the products was as repulsively twee as the goods themselves.

c. No-Name Taiwan-O-Flex video cameras.

I am blaming Taiwan, but perhaps this class of device was made also in Vietnam, Thailand, and India for some time. The names were all different, but in the camera shop we could recognise them by several distinguishing marks:

i. They were small and strangely shaped. Like bent bookends or pistol grips with a lens at the front and a fold-out LCD screen somewhere behind it.

ii. They were oddly coloured. Red, metallic green, brown…or some form of off-coloured anodizing that was always called ” champagne “. I suppose these days this would have to be ” chardonnay “. I prefer the technical term – ” dingy “.

iii. They were in the hands of the elderly or the dim. People who had gone into a mall electronics shop in Singapore and been conned into buying something that would be a ” universal ” camera. This trade used to be performed by the merchants of Steamer Point in Aden upon the migratory Briton. The Adenese now trade in artillery shells and diseases.

iv. They were non-functioning. It is possible that they never did work, and that they were defunct upon the assembly line before they were packaged. They were cameras that – like tinned gefilte fish – were not intended for use…only for trade.

v. They were unrepairable by any human agency whatsoever. The camera technician was torn between laughter and tears when he saw one of these but eventually resolved the choice by cursing.

d. The Aden slide projectors

That’s Aden – not Aldis. Aldis made a fairly decent range of slide projectors in the film era. No, Aden slide projectors were sourced from the 50’s Hong Kong sweatshops and sent out as ballast on the liquid manure ships. They looked like tiny little tin cabinets with bitty lenses at the front and a bewildering array of slide changers, filmstrip holders, or other accessories at the back. They must have seemed incredibly attractive to the British and European migrants as they travelled through the Suez canal.

The thing about them was that they were an electrical lottery ticket. Sent out from their factories with maker’s plates that avowed every electrical rating between 12vDC and 280vAC…I privately think some were designed to run on the main power line of the French SNCF railways – you could never tell whether they were actually what they said they were until you tried them out on your local electricity.

We have 240-260vAC at 50Hz here in Western Australia and it is reliable and pretty fierce – especially if your Steamer Point Special has been wired for 6vDC. I saw some of the results when Poms brought them into the shop in the 60’s demanding repair – you could as easily have repaired a mortar bomb after it had gone off.

The Arab camera salesmen must have been something to see in action…