One photographer’s love letter to the various contraptions of his undoing
Someone asked me the other day what it was that first interested me in photography. I’m embarrassed to say I’d never thought about it. After some consideration I was surprised by the answer. It was the camera.
I think this may be common among young people with the kind of brain that’s drawn to mechanical things. It was the contraption itself that first captivated me. Switches and levers and dials and such. I might’ve been an accordion player had I stumbled across one of those first.
There were cameras in our house. My dad had a Yashica SLR, the FX-D Quartz.1 Black with orange dials and one of those woven camera straps that ruled in the early 80s. My mom had a Kodak Instamatic, the kind with the flash cube that popped on top and rotated after every frame. We went on vacation in 1983 and I, a foetus, carried that Instamatic all across the battlefields of Gettysburg and Washington D.C. I photographed our stinking campground in Pennsylvania and the fancy racetrack we visited in Kentucky. By the time we returned home I was a photographer.
I still have that camera.
The following summer I broke my wrist, which nixed basketball camp. In its place, I signed up for the only summer school course with openings: photography. Side by side with big kids shooting 35mm in their SLRs, I learned darkroom development by cracking open 126 cassettes and threading them onto special developing reels.2 I made a magnificent photograph of the school’s playground; watching it materialize under red light, I was hooked.
I hijacked my dad’s Yashica at every opportunity and used it to take pictures throughout junior high. Next thing I know I’m working for the high school yearbook and in search of direction for college. I considered two: the University of Missouri — one of the finest photojournalism programs in the country — and a small school which offered photography classes. I chose the small school and somehow, miraculously, it still worked out.
In college I got serious about photography. Sports was my focus. As graduation neared, my father, living vicariously through me I now understand, bought for me a seriously professional SLR: the Nikon F4s. That tank of a camera remained my implement of choice for a decade, into my professional career, until medium format usurped it and the digital revolution made it obsolete.
I can pick any era of my life and remember not just the photographs from that time, but the cameras that made them.
In graduate school3 we were expected to shoot medium format. My compatriots wielded Mamiya RBs and RZs and, occasionally, Hasselblads. But I tackled all my assignments with another Yashica — a $50 flea market TLR. But I graduated, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The school rented Sinar 4×5 monorail view cameras for some classes. I used one for the better part of a year. Long enough to understand it was a lovely machine, solid and sleek, the kind of device that really made me feel like I was getting serious about photography. I was scheimpfluging all over the place.
Back home a regional department store chain went out of business and liquidated its photo studio, and I aquired…
Bill Sawalich • Photographer + Writer 