When I was an art history student, I studied early photography and the emergence of the “snapshot” and candid photography — made possible by the proliferation of Kodak box cameras and Brownies.
I was studying this just as digital point-and-shoot cameras started to show up for regular consumers to use. Long before camera phones, iPhones, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook. Long before we had to apply filters to give our photographs a sense of time and narrative. Photographs used to come to us days, weeks, months after we took them. And they already had a “patina” of sorts applied to them. Mega pixel count, image stabilisation and rapid, precise autofocus weren’t available. We weren’t reviewing and editing our images moments after we took them. We weren’t sharing them within minutes with huge networks friends colleagues. Instead they were placed in an album or shoebox and found decades later.
I like painting these old cameras. I find them in antique shops — they’re all over the place and easy to come by. Sometimes they still have film in them.
I like the idea that these cameras once captured all these moments and family history.
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| Four Vintage Cameras 16″ x 24″ / Oil/Canvas |
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| Four Kodaks 20″ x 20″ / Oil/Canvas |
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| Argus 24″ x 16″ / Oil/Canvas |
