Remembering an old, broken camera.

More than a decade ago, and I remember this as though it were yesterday, I was sitting in a North London pub waiting for my girlfriend to arrive. I had been taking photos with digital cameras for several years, but my thoughts had recently turned to film photography. I thought that film photography would not only be a fun medium to explore, but perhaps slower and more deliberate as well. It could also have been nostalgia for a time when we were more connected, physically, to the work we did. So I sat in the pub, drank my pint, and absent mindedly scrolled eBay looking at the options. I had no idea about film cameras back then, but when I saw an auction with only 10 minutes left and no bids, I decided that £12 was worth a punt and I became the proud owner of a Praktica MTL5b.

I remember loading film into it for the first time. I don’t remember what it was, probably Lomography 400, but I do remember feeling like I was performing open heart surgery. Quickly, I became more familiar with the process and began to fall in love. The MTL5b proved to be a simple and reliable camera for a year or so. As I used it more regularly, I developed that strange, personal affection that people can feel for inanimate things.

And then it began to break, and it was the best thing that could have happened. Gradually, over the course of another year or so, the camera evolved from being a faithful recorder of the scene in front of it, to a producer of dazzling, confusing images. The best of them were a chaos of multiple accidental exposures, all covered in light leaks. The camera was letting go of reality, right before my eyes. I take no credit for any beauty that people can find in the images: the MTL5b was just doing its own thing.

I took it with me on a trip to Turkey in a sweltering summer, and I used it extensively throughout the following winter. I used a DSLR concurrently, and the difference between the two is stark. The DSLR produced images which were accurate, precise renderings of the scene. They act as a good record of the time and place. The photos with an old, broken camera feel so much more than that, and I have returned to them much more often since.

The inevitable eventually happened. Something inside rattled audibly whenever it was picked up and it refused to function in any way. Its life was over. I don’t mind admitting that it made me sad. I wondered what to do next. I could have bought another old camera and hoped for the same thing to happen again. I could even have dropped it on the floor a few times if it refused to misbehave. In the end, I did nothing. It became a lesson in mono no aware: the Japanese love of fleeting beauty, coupled to the eventual sadness of its passing. That camera was my cherry blossom tree. I didn’t even keep it: I sent it for recycling along with a broken lamp.

I have used many more film cameras in the years since, but these are still the images I think about most fondly.

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