Our neighborhood sprouts signs like weeds every spring and fall; usually they are centered around telephone poles by busy intersections, and usually they are hand-lettered announcements of tag, rummage, and estate sales in our immediate vicinity. I dragged Jen to a couple this past Saturday morning, after a particular sign caught my eye: CAMERAS DOWN HERE. We found a salty-haired old gent standing in front of a card table with ten or so different cameras, and one caught my eye: a tall black square with two lenses stacked atop each other, looking like a NASA-certified cousin to my Kodak Duoflex. This was something more, though: Large teutonic lettering above the lenses identified it as a Rolleicord, the inexpensive brother to the famous Rolleiflex medium-format twin-lens reflex camera.
I talked to the guy a bit, and he claimed it had been serviced last year (about $100, if one can find a technician who still knows how to service these cameras), and a test of the shutter proved he was right. I paid him for the camera—probably a little more than it’s worth, to be honest—and brought it home to add to the collection. Some research indicates it’s a Rolleicord III, made sometime between 1950-1953 (s/n 1169169) and it takes regular 120 film, still available at better photographic shops worldwide. The negative is a 6x6cm image, much larger than standard 35-mm film, and with a good lens the image is sharper and lends to larger, clearer blowups.
We took the Duoflex with us on our trip to Ireland last year, filled with black and white TMAX, and shot some pretty amazing stuff.
I’d say the results were good in a LOMO kind of way—the imprecise glass lens of the Kodak added some blurring and distortion to the shots, which added to the general sense of melancholy and mystery.
I’m pretty excited by this find, and it’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time. Thanks to my father, I have an excellent 35-mm Minolta on my shelf, and I’ll never sell it. I spent many expensive months attempting to learn how to use it properly in college, and many more expensive months learning how to develop the film. I have a gaggle of antique 620 cameras, each in perfect condition and ready for a new adventure. They will accompany us on our next trip to parts unknown, and bring back imperfect, atmospheric snapshots that mean more to me than a crisp digital file.
This camera, though, is a step above the average, and it demands I take the time to learn how to use it, which is fine by me.
When I was a kid in New Jersey we had six channels to watch: the three main networks, the Fox affiliate (FOX 5, before it was Nazis, home of the Godzilla creature feature at Halloween and It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas), Channel 29 (home of Star Blazers and M*A*S*H reruns), and PBS. One day I caught a show on PBS that had a guy dressed in odd pseudo-military clothing who taught kids how to draw, and the first time I saw it I was VERY interested in watching the rest of the shows. Unfortunately it never followed a schedule that made any sense and so I wound up only seeing a handful of episodes.
Fast forward to college, when my friend Tim and I were talking about random stuff and shared a common memory from youth: the drawing show on PBS. Turns out it was produced here in Maryland by MPT, and turns out he was a guest on the show as a kid for one of the episodes!
Fast forward to last night,when the same subject came up and I was talking about it with my sister-in-law. I had to find it, and the Internet provided: a series called Secret City, where the host tought kids to draw all kinds of different things. Enjoy:
This is a lovely rememberance of the hugely influential graphic designer/printmaker David Lance Goines, someone we studied in art school for both subjects. His was a singular visual voice, and he had a passion for typography (as most printmakers do).
Here’s how art is supposed to work: Someone writes a book. They write it with passion, with abandon, with honesty and lyricism and even a bit of recklessness. It is of their time, using the words of their time.
Readers respond to this recklessness, this abandon, this rawness, this timeliness. The only books that ever mattered to anyone are raw, are unbridled, are risky, and timely. Then, if a parent or teacher reads the book to a kid, and there’s a part that’s risky or controversial, discussions can be had. If the book is old, then the words and sentiments of that time can be taken into account.
Long ago in 1995 I was watching MTV while making my dinner and saw a clip featuring a scruffy-looking Portland band playing a killer song. I just happened to have a copy of the City Paper and saw that they were playing the 8×10 on a weeknight, so naturally I roped my roommates into going down and seeing the show, where we all had a great time and I bought a copy of the CD and a T-shirt. Any resemblance to my dog’s current name is purely coincidental. But this song rips.
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My friend Rosie, who I hired at WRI and subsequently got hired away by the Wall Street Journal, had her very first byline last week, a story on coaching trees in the NFL. Yay Rosie!
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Here’s some new tasty font goodness from an old-school design/web hero of mine: Dan Cederholm put up a storefront with some excellent display fonts and design-nerd merch.
Wow. The cameras are all beautiful, and the picture looks right from the period.