2 APRIL 06
For the move from Oregon to New Jersey, we needed a new credit card. Something blank. One bank was offering a free camera so I applied for that card, thinking a small, lightweight camera could come in handy on the trip.
By this time, I’d been living with a photographer for over 8 years and was rarely taking pictures myself. But the camera that came was such a little piece of junk, such a toy, that I took to it and entered into another phase of looking around through a lens.
Recently I found out that the description "toy camera" is a term in use not only at our house but everywhere, and that some of the reasons I liked the toy camera are reasons other people like them too. (Heard it on the radio.)
"...how it makes a kind of awkward 'poing' sound when you press its button, as if it kind of breaks itself to function." There’s even a magazine called Light Leaks. And, as you can see from these examples, the light leak ("like an accent in speech") is a feature.
The toy camera can't be focused or have its aperture adjusted, cheerfully thwarting any urge to get fussy. "Focus Free" it says right on the body.
"Scenes from an imaginary journey."
The thing is, although the camera is cheap (or free, in this case), the development & printing is expensive. Living in a one-room apartment behind a gas station, painting in a former pigpen (literally) on a farm in the next town over, I had no space to make a darkroom. And so, after shooting maybe 10 or 15 rolls of film, I slowed to a stop. I didn't think of a digital camera--we didn't even own a computer.
. . . . .
