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Photography With A Toy Camera (Holga)
Except for a period in England, I grew up in
Albany, a small town in southwest Georgia. At
the age of 20, I moved to Atlanta in order to
attend the Art Institute of Atlanta.
I shoot 120 Black & White film in a Holga
Camera (creating negatives slightly larger
than 2-1/4" square). The Holga is an all plastic
camera first produced (poorly) in China in 1982,
when 120mm film was the most common format.
With a name derived from the cantonese word
for "very bright", the Holga was intended as a
cheap introduction into photography for the
masses. Soon the Holga was overtaken by the
dominance of 35mm film cameras.
Each Holga is different and its' imperfections
affect the film in an individual way. Light leaks
are common, although I wrap my camera in
velcro to minimize them. I sometimes shoot
multiple exposures on a single negative. The film
does not automatically advance. It must be
done manually, making that a simple in-camera
technique. The film spools are often loose,
creating out of focus images because the film
doesn't lie flat on the focus plane. Since the lens
is plastic, the image edges are distorted and
sometimes a double "ghost image" is seen near
the outer edges. Light falloff from the plastic lens
causes a darkening of the edges in most cases.
The Holga is not a single lens reflex camera
(SLR means that when you look through a
viewfinder, you are seeing through the lens)
The viewfinder is simply a hole near the top of
the camera that doesn't line up with the lens.
This causes an image shift that varies
depending on how close the camera is focusing.
I print on cotton rag fine art paper with an
Epson 7800 and a negative carrier that has
been filed out, so on the print there is an
irregular border, with the film code and numbers
sometimes visible. The resulting Archival Pigment
Images are acid free and rated to last at least
100 years. As the inks have gotten better,
Archival Pigment Images are now accepted
as the future of photographic printing and are
collected by museums, galleries, and corporate
collections the world over.
The overall effect is a dark, Bronze colored,
moody image that doesn't quite record what
was really there. Instead it is my own
unpredictable version of the truth. While every
image that I believe will be great, often isn't,
images that I took offhandedly, may turn
out spectacularly.
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