amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Sorry to say, that camera is actually a long, long way from Holga or Diana or Seagull standards... It's a plasticky 35mm giveaway camera, while all those others use medium format film and there were even some dedicated accessories for them, such as wide angle and telephoto lenses and flashes. Holga, Diana have fan clubs... folks who celebrate their foibles and light leaks. That dusty, plastic beast doesn't even have a brand name!

Bipod

Correct: it looks more substantial than Holga, Diana or Seagull. But of course, it's the brand name that matters.
"A rose by any other brand name would not smell as sweet."

Far be it from me to detract from "Holga, Diaana and Seagull standards".

"Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber bands
To get rid of itself" --Radiohead, "Fake Plastic Trees"

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

As always you have nailed the basic history of the Holga camera but missed the boat on those who choose to work with a device that is absolutely flawed but has values that go well beyond the opposite craze for an intricate quality and has nothing to do with making traditional images. It falls under the place where Ansel Adams pointed to when he spoke "I would rather see a technically poor quality image of a good idea than an excellent quality image of a poor concept (paraphrased)".

While we are beating up plastic cameras, don't! Kodak and Fuji sold point and shoot cameras by the butt load, at the processor the cameras were broken open and discarded. I collected these cameras and removed the 'stare wheel' then loaded these with 400 ISO B&W film in a darkroom. These were given to poor kids and middle class school aged children to make photographs. These were summer classes lead by the same woman, Melanie, shown in the sexy portrait. She had an MFA from UTSA and was a truly gifted teacher who loved low tech and exposing children to darkroom photography at the Southwest Craft Center in San Antonio Texas.

The results of their photography was just amazing!

Now to the heads up. Carl Zeiss was making the plastic lenses for those cameras that Kodak and Fiji were using in those 'disposable' cameras. A little snooping around landed this lovely tid bit of knowledge. Zeiss mass cast plastic lenses, then the plastic lenses were scanned by a laser for quality and the majority were removed as the passed the laser using a puff of air, the acceptable lenses went on to be camera lenses.

Remember the Kodak panoramic camera? It had an insert of plastic to mask most of the image so you got a nice long panoramic negative. Well that was a multiple lensed construct that was about an 18mm lens and the image was a full 35mm image when you removed the plastic mask from the camera.

Comparison tests showed that the 18mm Kodak Panoramic camera would make images comparable to a Nikon body and their 20mm wide angle lens! When you apply technology and mass production to an idea you can get great results.

The Holga camera was to photography as Andy Warhol was to a Campbell's soup can. If your hungry to eat, go get a can of soup, if your hungry to see art...Warhol and Holga images can satisfy.

Bipod

OK, you've convinced me: the Holga is a good disposable camera.

First off, as someone who has ground telescope mirrors and made ground-glass
screens, as well as restored a lot of plastic (thank heaven for Maguire Mirrorglaze
plastic polish!) your ringing endorsement of plastic lenses makes me want to laugh.

To build any particular lens design, you need materials with the correct refractive
indexes. To achive correction for chromatic aberration, two different refractive
indexes are required. Plastics are never as dense as glass, so the range of reflractive
indexes are limited. Some lens designs cannot even be done entirely in glass: they
require a calcium fluorite element.

During manufacturing, one has to worry about the durabilityof plasics and their
susceptability to certain solvents. But most of all: it's difficult or impossible to apply
standard optical coatings to plastic. Vacuum deposition won't work, since there is too
much heating of the element. Most plastics also tends to "gas off" severely in a vacuum
chamber, making it difficult to achieve a good vacuum.

The coatings currently used by Nikon on plastic eyeglass lenses are in fact soluble in
hot water (as I learned the hard way)! Good, durable coatings are a requirment for
lenses used in photography.

Turning to art:

Warhol was an extremely sophisticated artist. He studied commerical art at what is now
Carnegie-Mellon University and was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design
in 1949. More importantly, he was a central figure in modern art and knew personally
most of the important artists of his day (at least the ones based in NYC). Moreover, he was
deeply involved in photography, film-making and even music (as a producer).

I'm afraid not many lomographers have much in common with Andy Warhol.:-)

A better analogy might be with the NYC downtown "no wave" music scene of the 1980s,
and the bands it influenced, some of which used some lower quality or damaged guitars.

But there is a still a strking difference: nobody liked unreliable amps or mics. They may
have used their equipment to music that was the opposite of "easy listening", but the
definition of "noise" did not include 60 Hz hum or tape hiss. Glenn Branca was just as
careful to exclude hum and hiss from his recordingss as Frank Sinatra was from his.

And no guitarist -- not even Thurston Moore--likes to break a guitar string. Sonic Youth's
guitarists tuned up just as carefully as any band (most of the time), just not to standard
E-A-D-G-B-E tuning.

Bad is not an aesthetic. Light leaks are not an effect. Thin brittle plastic is not durable.

The goal of using simple means, lenses with character, and keeping costs reasonable are
things that I entirely support. But by no stretch of the imagination is the Holga a good
or durable camera. And no amount of ideology or propaganda can change that fact..

I truly believe that lomography has been a good infuence on photography. But believing things
that aren't true is never good. A photographer or artist should chose his materials and tools
with the end result in mine--not based on ideology or propaganda.

Unless of course he is a conceptual artist who doesn't particularly care what the final image
looks like, or whether or not it is permanent. Then he can make sculptures out of meat or
build a giant man and set it afire. But few photographes want to set their prints on fire.

The missing link in lomography is the patron or buyer. Warhol's works were sold in
galleries in Manhatttan, such as the Hugo Gallery and Bodley Gallery, and the Fergus Gallery
in LA. Gallery owners are businessmen: as much as they may want to support a particular
artrist or photographer, they need works that will sell. And photographer as well as
artists need sales and/or commissions.

The sad thing about the Holga is that it probably is possible to build a pretty nice simple
camera (with a glass lens) out of plastic. Kodak's Brownie Hawkeye came close--except
for the crappy 1-element lens and the brittleness of the Bakelite.

Simpler and cheaper can in fact be better: a plain washer has a circular aperture
equivalent to a diaphram with an infinite number of blades! It cannot stick or break.
But most plastics are simply not durable. They wear escessively or turn brittle and
break.

Holgas tend to have light leaks because its manufacturing tolerances are poor, and no
effort is made to introdue a light baffle material to "plug" the leaks. Simply put:
it's low quality manufacturing. That may be an attitude (making money matters more than
quality), but it's not an aesthetic.

topcat Loc: Alameda, CA

It is a toy camera, like a Holga or a Diana.Not worth much, but there are a lot of people that love these toy cameras.Sometimes they have light leaks and sometimes when you don't advance the film, you get double exposures. You can look on line to see some of the groups.

I have one for 35mm film and one for 120. Don't use it a lot any more, but sometimes I take it out to shoot a roll.