Michael Bryant

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 (pooply) in China in 1982, when 120mm film was the most common found. It 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 down manually, making that 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 reflec camera (SLR means that when you look through the view-finder, you are seeing through the lens). The viewfinder is simply a hold 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. I do not do any manipulation in the computer that I couldn’t do in the wet darkroom. The resulting Archival Pigment Images are acid free and rated to last at least 100 years. 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, image that I took offhandedly, may turn out spectacularly.