holga lens

It’s not everyday that you ruin £260 worth of digital camera. But that’s exactly what I did to my Nikon P7000 in a winter blizzard on Rhinog Fach, in North Wales, a couple of weeks ago. It was a long time since a camera had died on me, the whole £25 of it: my Holga camera. One day something mysteriously started rattling inside it and the camera stopped working.  It was a plastic toy camera after all.
The sheer frustration of losing expensive Nikon gear that I only bought five months ago is making me think that, perhaps, my next mountaineering camera will be another Holga. At least they make them with a glass lens now – which is a shame, really. Yes, the classic medium format Holga film camera has a plastic lens that renders the world is such an imperfect and distorted way that, actually, it shows it very much as it often is.

Lomography cult followers swear by the dreamy, surreal image quality delivered by Holga lenses. The camera also has poorly engineered light seals that let light leak into the film plane, adding some ‘visual interest’ to the image. Every camera leaks in a different and unique way.
It may well be plasticky but you can also do pretty serious work with the Holga. I have had Holga work that tackles issues of identity and place published and even exhibited. Thomas Michael Alleman took some Holgas to Inner Mongolia and produced a remarkable set of images. And a few years back  David Burnett took a whole series of images of Al Gore with a Holga camera. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to turn up on a magazine commission branding a plastic toy camera though.
Toy camera or not the Holga does something remarkably well. It liberates the photographer from the responsibility of having to transcribe the world in a visually accurate way. In other words, it does away with the tension between aesthetics and subject matter. By not being able to fully control the look of the resulting image, the Holga photographer has no option but to concentrate on content. Surprisingly, the Holga can make you a better photographer.

Having said that, the Holga image  can also be all about aesthetics, regardless of content. The plastic camera has the potential to foster pure instinctive photography based exclusively on aesthetic appeal and visual perception. Inforescence-art sells large format canvas prints of Holga photographs based on this principle.
Or it can be primarily a visual experience but still have a certain documentary unsecured loans flavour, as the work of Susan Bowen demonstrates. Working with a Holga camera, Bowen purposefully overlaps exposures to create quasi-cinematic photographic images.
I know what you will be thinking, that there is no point having a medium format plastic toy camera with a plastic lens when you can simulate the effect in Photoshop. Admittedly, you can achieve very convincing Holga-like results with digital manipulations. But that would be missing the point, because the Holga experience is not just about achieving the soft, vignetted, scratched and light-leaked trademark Holga look. The point of the Holga experience is precisely using the Holga camera itself, in all its plastic wonderfulness.
Mind you, if you want the best bad credit loans of both worlds, as in the digital world and the classic poor quality of the plastic fantastic Holga lens, now you can buy the actual Holga lens with an adapter to fit most DSLR mounts.
In fact, I’m tempted to buy the Holga lens for Nikon mount myself.