Paul Cowan Art Collections

Historic camera set

A set of photographs, shot on medium format black and white film, of a collection of antique film cameras. The idea is to give an authentic retro look to the subjects. At some stage during shooting or processing, the emulsion of the negatives picked up some short scratches which will be visible at full size. It wasn't my intention to have that happen but it is a risk of working in this medium and hand developing. I believe the results I achieved would, in any case, have been considered acceptable by most professional photographers working in the 1950s and 60s, and so it is acceptable within the terms of the concept. The film was shot with a Pentacon Six, East German camera which was originally produced in the mid-1950s and continued to be made until about 1990. The lens was a late-version Biometar 80/2.8, Zeiss Jena's version of the West German Zeiss Planar, and the film was Fomapan 200, which I believe is based on a 1950s formula that has been sold to the Czech manufacturers.