A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Lomography. The LC-A, the camera that started the now iconic movement, was developed under the USSR by the LOMO Russian Arms and Optical factory. A flawed copy of a Japanese model, it none-the-less quickly became popular within the communist bloc, until it was, so the legend goes, discovered in a second hand camera store by a group of Viennese students on a tour of Prague. The strangely ghost like images that the camera produced quickly captured the imagination of the artistic community in the West and in 1992, the Lomographic society was born, its mission to promote Lomography throughout the world. They laid down ten golden rules (see opposite) designed to capture the spontaneity of the new art form, though symbolically enough the final rule is ‘there are no rules’.

In Ipswich there’s only one shop that sells Lomo cameras and the 120mm format film that it uses: Inspired on the Buttermarket. Richard, the owner, tells me “We started Inspired because we realised there was a gap in the market in Ipswich for a place selling funky designer goods, things like Ugly Dolls, after Wow closed down. They used to do a little Lomo, but not as much as we do. It was clear that it was a growing craze and we had a lot of interest in our first week, and we sold a lot of cameras.” In spite of the recession it seems that Lomography’s popularity is not waning; no doubt because it stands for a kind of simplicity and magical escape that are anathema to the financial crisis. It’s no surprise, then, that the photos often take on the air of a fairy tale. “This is especially the case with the Diana and Holga cameras,” says Richard, “which aren’t completely sealed so you get light leaks and effects like that, which people go after.”

The camera’s defects are turned into assets and add to the mediums ethereal quality. Given the movement’s childlike naivety, it seems appropriate that these delightful devices should have such sweet names. In fact Diana started off as a toy camera in 1950s America that could be purchased for a mere couple of dollars, before it was bought and revitalised by the Lomographic Society International. “I have the Diana, which I quite like because you get that old lo-fi vignetting effect,” says Richard. “It has a range of four lenses like the fish eye [with its famous distorting magic mirror effect] and a wide-angle lens, so it’s very versatile. It’s also a pinhole camera, so you can take really long exposures.”

In 1994 the Lomographic Society International held massive exhibitions in New York and Moscow, and started the first embassy in Berlin. Despite its dependence on old-fashioned technology, the outlook of the movement is firmly modern, and so around this time the nascent art form began to invade the emerging medium of the internet. Today you can find thousands of sites spanning every country showcasing the wealth of gorgeous imagery these cameras have produced. There is a real sense of community around the camera, and this is reflected in Inspired, which features a small gallery of photographs taken by staff and customers. A small homage to the 1997 Lomographic world congress in Madrid, which boasted a LomoWall of 120 meters made up of over 35000 photos!

www.lomography.com

Words > Dean Bowman