Jay Rochlin

Plastic Fantastic Camera
The Holga

By Jay Rochlin

JPEGS, GIFFS, and TIFFS. 

It’s a whole new world and photography is fun again. No, it’s not the latest 8 –point-whatever mega pixel computer with a lens on the front and a tiny TV in the back. Just the opposite. I’ve found the Holga.

Cast titanium? No. Plastic. Black plastic on the outside with a plastic see-through viewfinder on the inside.

3x optical 7x digital f 2.8 to 4.5 rare earth glass zoom?  Nope. Plastic. No zoom. One speed, but not necessarily the same from shot to shot.

USB interface? 32 megs internal memory? I don’t think so.

Roll film with paper backing. The camera has a red window in the back that you look through so you know when to stop winding the plastic knob.

Now, that’s a whole new world. Or, back to the old one.

I started shooting with a Brownie Hawkeye when I was nine. Black bakelite body that you held at your waist and peered down into an inch square piece of glass. You pushed the button and hoped for the best.

I moved into the world of 35 in high school. A Sears rangefinder. Family, friends, dogs, rivers, cactus, and mountains. The notebooks are brittle.  The negatives are as good as new.  

During college, I saw the late 60s through the ground glass of a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex. Solid, reliable, and a perfect square frame. Images captured in silver, forever.  College girls in Arizona, Seri wood carvers in Mexico, ancient Arab men in Jerusalem’s old city, hippies in San Francisco, and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights living in their own black and grey world. The shots are all there. Grain-by-silver-halide-grain, on film that I developed myself in a dinky college apartment bathroom.

The film, camera, chemicals, the snap of the shutter. Real. Permanent. My Uncle Freddie said, “If there isn’t a picture, it didn’t happen.” We’re still making prints from negatives shot during the civil war. Lasting.

I’m not sure about mega pixels. They record accurately. It’s hard to mess up. That auto everything digital gets colors right. But for now, for me, it doesn’t feel as real. CDs fade and formats change. X’s and O’s aren’t grains of silver. As the world transitioned to digital music, audiophiles said they could hear the holes in the notes. I know what they mean.

They call the Holga a toy camera. Sometimes the back falls off. Fifteen bucks, brand new, if you find a deal. Twenty if you don’t.

I pick up the Holga. It barely weighs. I frame a shot and snap the shutter. The picture will be a surprise. Plastic cameras that leak light are like that.

Sometimes the surprise is right on target. Sometimes it captures a mood or a feeling you can’t see with your eyes. And it’s there, on film, for good.

A thousand baby pictures. The kid grows up. The film is protected in see-through sleeves. The film will be there for him or his children.

I’ve shot thousands of digital pictures. Most are gone already. Deleted by me. Lost on some random CD or discarded with the hard drive on my last computer. 

I take out my Holga and photograph a tattered American flag at an Indian reservation cemetery west of Tucson. The picture, slightly blurry, almost dreamy, captures the mixed emotions I feel seeing mounds of dirt and headstones lovingly decorated with hundreds of plastic flowers placed there that Veterans Day by wives and children and brothers and sisters of Indians who fought our wars.

The graves are going to be there 100 years from now. Hopefully, an American flag will be there also. And the negatives, tucked away in some closet or in a drawer, might shed light on what an old Indian graveyard felt like back at the turn of the century. Like it did for me when I saw the picture.

The Holga is a toy and it’s fun, and its playful, and it takes pictures with feeling.

Forever.