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May 28, 2008
The Rollei MiniDigi AF 5.0 is a three-inch high, fully functional digicam replica of the original classic twin reflex camera. This camera is all about nostalgia as it is not much higher than a roll of 120 film -- the capture medium of the original TLR Rolleiflex! It can be worn around the neck as a pendant without looking ridiculous. If it were hanging on a Christmas tree, it wouldn't stand out from the other ornaments.
Since Rollei is selling the cachet of its brand here, not state-of-the-art electronics I guess that it will become part of the already strong cult followings for the Diana+, Holga, Lensbabies, and other funky, niche cameras and lenses that open out the possibilities of fragmentary compositional form that implies an ongoing (re)construction of a more complex, polycentric, labyrinthine order.
These kind of cameras push us away from the technological fetish in photography and the modernist style of photography that is concerned with its own difference and medium to a more artistic use of the camera as in this work by Penny Elizabeth Neil at Flickr and on the lovely Sparrow Salvage weblog or visual journal, whose roots are in the west Gippsland region of Victoria.
This is 19th century world on the edge of a railway town that is a world away from the consumerism of the modern metropolis, and if it is nostalgia for what has past into history, then it is a reworking of that nostalgia in a critical Walter Benjamin like vein to express the undercurrents of post-modernity.
Penny says that her work explores:
a sort of post-apocalyptic slumber, a place where people have long ceased to be, and the environment we so obsessively build up has continued on without us. I combine this with my mysterious adoration of the torn, the tattered, the rusting and the bracken-entwined.
We are moving away from the habitual resort in the art institution to the Romantic prerogatives underlying modernist aesthetic tenets such as the avant-garde "original", the artist as unique creative instance, the dialectic of subjective realisation through liberation from convention and so forth, that informs much cultural criticism of the contemporary "postmodern" moment.
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On the recent trip to Taiwan to visit my daughter she was taking all her photos with the Diana+.
I now have a few of the prints - not too bad really - interesting light leaks and such