I've had it shelved for ages - the meter died twenty years ago even after repairs, and the shutter speeds seemed sluggish the last time I tried it. But after years hauling around the Nikon N90 as my go-to film SLR, I was surprised how light the OM-1 is. I'd forgotten how easy it is to carry around. I ran into Chris Chen aka furcafe, and although he's not an OM-1 owner he admires the compact size - not much bigger than a classic Leica rangefinder, he pointed out (as he frequently does, he had a Leica for comparison). Chris pointed out that the shutter-speed controls on the front of the camera, around the lens, strikes him as strange - most cameras have shutter speed controlled by a dial on top of the camera. But this is how I learned it.
The earliest OM-1 shot I can find on my flickr stream, the late Willem Breuker, ca. 1996:
I loaded my OM-1 with Fuji 200 and expected the shutter speeds to result in a lot of overexposed shots. But the roll turned out alright. This old school corner shop is home to the Capital Bikeshare station I use. It also seems to be the only place on the Hill where I can find Pom juice.
Olie's Trollie downtown - the blown highlights may be due more to my not compensating than to slow shutter speeds:
, edited by Erik Kessels, is printed on a pretty pink stock. It’s nearly the color of the Financial Times, but rather than conveying fickle market trends, this tome sets in print a singular, enduring obsession.
?). For some reason this column stresses me out more than anything else I write, and perhaps I end up overwriting now and then to compensate. I'll occasionally highlight some of my P&C blurbs here.
. Thus the intelligent B-movie is no oxymoron, and The Stuff is enjoyable, thoughful and just well-acted enough to put the lie to the notion that Psychotronic necessarily equals "bad." A natural fount of bubbling sweet white stuff is found in Alaska and marketed as a dessert. But is the stuff...alive? Michael Moriarty (whose aw-shucks with a hint of menace would have made him perfect for The Killer Inside Me) investigates the titular material's mysterious contents for a rival company, only to find himself face-first in it. Could this satirical story of the killer inside us have foretold 21st century cupcake mania? You will eat a cupcake. You will eat a cupcake.
; to 
The discomfort with which I type or even shorten the title is the first sign that this is not your ordinary collection of vernacular photography. The title is based on a 1924 book called Cooning with Cooners, on the culture of Ohio raccoon hunters. The phrase is seen early in the present book, emblazoned on a trailer hitched to a station wagon in front of which one proud hunter poses with this hound. The photographs gathered here were made by one such hunter who worked through the 1960s, which places it in a context in which the changing world outside them seems to have had little effect on their language and bloodlust. It is a cruel tease that the book opens with a photograph of two playfully alive raccoons, for the rest of the book documents the plundering of the animals (if not, as the accompanying essay points out, to their extinction, as the buffalo), and the dogs and men who hunt them for their pelts.
(yes, its name has a comma; yes, that's awfully precious) would have you believe that "many TLRs are hundreds of dollars," which I guess is true if you want a Rolleiflex. But you can easily get, say, a 
proudly announces itself as the first film conceived, created, produced and danced by the New York City Ballet. But the film’s directors have some creative cachet as well. Co-directors Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes came fresh from very different projects: Joost was part of the team that brought you the controversial Catfish (his co-director and co-star of that film, Ariel Schulman, is production designer here), and Lipes made the fascinating documentary 
Jane Jacobs wrote of the city as an “intricate ballet, in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.” The work of choreographer Jerome Robbins could be seen as a stylish embodiment of that romantic ideal. Robbins’ NY Export: Opus Jazz was envisioned as a companion piece to his work in 
, and the paralells are clear in the kind of gangland tension and young sexuality, lines both flowing and staccato.
film, expansive or contemplative when needed, with a few stagelight lens flares thrown in for a sparing touch of the spotlight. The wide-angle lens used for most of the dance sequences give the performers room to breathe, and don’t make the mistake that dance films sometimes do of cutting away too much from the performers bodies. The aspect ratio is so wide that the film would be wonderful to see on a big movie screen.
, perhaps live in an abandoned warehouse, I promise full Stendahl Syndrome overload.
(its reissue now out-of-print and collectible) to Martin Parr’s 
(reviewed here 
is a fine example of the photobook as visual literature, for in spirit and texture it comes off as a marriage between Kerouac’s 
and Robert Frank’s 
(separate if related works - advantage Frank).
who didn’t have time to stop and dream. These alternate with full-bleed two-page closeups of lovers and other strangers. The images are at once historical and timeless, though some of the Gill Sans-laid text has dated, with exchanges like, “You dance like an African negress” answered by “I’d like to have a child by a negro.”
who moved to Paris in 1949 and lived at New York’s infamous Chelsea hotel for a while - a few of her paintings in fact still adorn the hotel's storied walls. Myers’ drawings are featured throughout the book as well. If Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris transports you to the Paris of the twenties, then the gritty photos and rhythmic page layouts of Love on the Left Bank will transport you to 1956.
is based on a classic plastic camera design from the 1960s. The Diana and her many variations took 120 sized film, and were/are not known for build quality - and that includes the Lomo "
was made with the same instrument - the Plaubel Makina 6X7 - Martin Parr used for his photobook 
Both trained an eye on Thatcher England, but while Parr found the lively and garish color in the middle-class on vacation, Graham paints a much darker, and perhaps more accurate picture of the state of the nation. In 1985 and 1986, Graham visited Social Security offices throughout England. He applied for permission from the DHSS, but was denied; so he surreptitiously made pictures without looking through the viewfinder - propping the camera on chairs or floors, holding it at waist level. The resulting compositions - skewed, voyeuristic - reflect a life out of balance. The Plaubel-Makina is a rangefinder and thus does not make the conspicuous ka-chunk of an SLR, so his subjects are unaware of and unaffected by his presence. What they are affected by is the tedium and desperation of bleak and sometimes filthy government offices, usually crowded and understaffed, where waits could last up to three hours and the payoff could be zero.
!), developing an affordable library of classic and contemporary photography.
