Lomography: How plastic cameras stole my youth (and gave it back again)

Back in the ​early Noughties, I developed an expensive infatuation with toy-like analogue cameras. It was all the fault of the Arches in Glasgow, which, in 2001, hosted an exhibition of Lomography – photographs taken using boxy, retro-style cameras designed and built at the Lomo factory in St Petersburg from the 1980s onwards. The cameras themselves weren’t particularly pricey (the whole point of them was that they were supposed to be cheap and therefore something comrades across the communist world could enjoy), but the random, never-know-what-you’re-going-to-get element they injected into the process of taking photographs was highly addictive.

Cat Skiing at Mustang Powder, British Columbia, Canada, as seen through a Lomo Fisheye No.2 camera | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

How much money did I burn through developing films from Lomo cameras in the first ​f​ew years of the 21st century? I shudder to think, but with a success rate of approximately one decent image per 36-exposure film, suffice to say that if I’d saved all that cash and invested it in Apple shares instead, just as Steve Jobs and Co were figuring out how to incorporate digital cameras into mobile phones, I could probably have retired by now, and would be writing this from the deck of my yacht, somewhere in the Caribbean.

The first Lomo camera to be developed was the LOMO LC-A, modelled on a Japanese compact camera called the Cosina CX-1, and it soon became popular everywhere hammers and sickles were in vogue. Then, in 1991, with the Iron Curtain duly consigned to the Great Skip of History, a group of Viennese students came across some of these odd-looking picture boxes while visiting Prague, fired off a load of frames, developed the films when they got home, and were promptly blown away by the distinctive, out-of-time images they produced. The following year, they set up the Lomographic Society International (LSI), with its own “Ten Golden Rules of Lomography” and, a little later, wrote a full-blown Lomography Manifesto. Fast-forward to 1996, and, when it looked as if the folks at the Lomo factory were about to call time on their quirky plastic cameras, the evangelists at the LSI travelled to Russia and convinced the head honchos there to continue production. There was, they explained, a market for these little cameras in the west...

Crossing the California-Nevada border at the Heavenly ski resort with a Lomo Action Sampler | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

By the time I first became aware of Lomography, the LOMO LC-A was by no means the only Lomo camera on offer – I was able to buy an Action Sampler, which allowed you to capture a sequence of four images on a single exposure, and a Fisheye No. 2, which, with its 10mm lens, made everything look as if you were shooting from inside a slightly murky goldfish bowl. Proceeding further down this retro photographic rabbit hole, I also got myself a Holga 120N, which meant shooting on medium format film – even more expensive to buy and develop.

None of this would really have mattered if I hadn’t had anything much of interest to point these cameras at during my 20s. However, my plastic camera mania happened to coincide with the period of my life when I got to travel the most – no kids, no responsibilities, and for some reason almost completely impervious to jetlag. Had I owned a sensible, straightforward digital camera during this time, even with my very-basic-verging-on-Neanderthal understanding of photography, I would still have ended up with a well-organised image bank that would now enable me to relive this period in glorious Technicolor whenever I wanted. Instead, all I have is a shoebox full of madness – a chaotic haystack of pictures which, taken together, resemble a nonsensical, globetrotting acid trip.

Double exposure of surfers at Blehaven Bay, East Lothian | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

A chance of a lifetime to go cat-skiing in the Monashee Mountains in British Columbia, for example – bottomless powder snow every day for a week – could potentially have yielded some spectacular action shots. Instead, I have a few wonky fish-eye images of people emerging from snow cats, the huge, brawny machines looking comically small beside the skiers standing in front of them, due to the way the lens distorts the image. Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco? Action Sampler images of somebody’s Converse trainers (nope, no idea whose) walking along a sunny sidewalk. A surf contest at Dunbar? Various trippy double-exposure portrait experiments, none of them very successful. A ski trip to Heavenly at Lake Tahoe? Another Action Sampler series, this one taken while snowboarding across the California-Nevada border, only with my finger covering nearly half of one of the four frames that make up the image. I could go on, but you get the general idea – for the most part, the only visual record I have of this time in my life looks like a Monty Python film directed by David Lynch.

Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

Towards the end of the Noughts I got myself a “proper” DSLR camera, started taking “proper” pictures, and put the plastic cameras and the shoebox full of wonky prints away. A few weeks ago, though, I got them all out again for the first time in about a decade, and decided that perhaps my plastic-fantastic years weren’t a complete waste after all. These days the world is flooded with perfect images, many of them artificially tweaked to look even more perfect; at least with an overexposed and out-of-focus analogue shot you know you’re looking at something real.

For more on Lomography, visit www.lomography.com