Shortly after I bought the pinhole camera for my husband at Christmas, I came across a description of another low-tech camera, the Holga, on I Blame the Patriarchy. I was intrigued by some of the effects, and you couldn’t go wrong on the price: $20. One measly Andrew! I ordered one immediately.

Holga’s claim to fame, believe it or not, is that it takes pictures out of focus. The camera has a plastic body and is so shoddily constructed that light leaks in. Even if you paint the inside matte black and seal the holes with black tape, there are only four f-stops (pictorially represented as a face, a family of three, a group of people, and some mountains) and two shutter speeds (clouds and sunshine), making precision photography difficult. There are also a number of pitfalls that await the novice Holga photographer, into all of which I fell as I began to use the camera: Film upside down? Check. Film exposed inadvertantly while re-loading? Check. Wrong manual film-advance setting for film mask? Check. Double-exposure because I forgot to advance the film manually? Check.

Now, the whole blurry-on-purpose thing has been around since Julia Margaret Cameron, but the wonderful thing about the Holga is that it gives depth and texture to a photograph that is difficult for me to get with a 35 mm. I suppose it is a bit of a cop-out to avoid the hard work and study that true craft entails and instead choose to work in a medium that has built-in limitations, and then crow, “Look at me! Look how artsy-fartsy I can be even when my medium imposes all these strictures on me!” (Symbolism alert: You know how some poetry is about baking a pie or pitching a baseball but it is really about writing poetry? Well, you can connect the dots from here.)

Anyway, here are some early efforts. I had so many technical difficulties with the first few rolls that there wasn’t much to choose from. They are not good, but they do give you an idea of what the Holga can do.





Pretty artsy-fartsy, eh?