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Nintendo's Mario endures even as games come and go
New Akron exhibit trains lens on point-and-shoot pictures
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Nov 23, 2008
Art and fashion share many things, but first and foremost, the two modes of expression share fads — momentary enthusiasms for particular artists, styles or gimmicks because so-and-so in New York (Los Angeles, London, Paris, Barcelona) says they're cool.
A few months down the road, the fad has passed, and if you (gasp!) mention it to the artist or curator who told you about it in the first place, he or she will look at you like you just stepped in something nasty.
The current small show at the Akron Art Museum, Toying With Imagination: A Plastic Camera Exhibition, has all the hallmarks of such a fad — enthusiasm for small, cheap plastic cameras that seems to be based on little else but novelty, plus impatience and defensiveness with questioners on the part of those who must justify their passion.
When you look up the origins of the movement, however, you find out that this ''fad'' has been under way in certain circles since the early 1990s, and shows no signs of going away. eBay sells thousands of these little cameras, and often they're no longer so cheap.
The most famous is the LOMO, created by the Soviets and discovered by Viennese vacationers just when the LOMO factory was about to shut down in 1991. Persuaded that there was a market for the cute little 35mm fixed-lens disposables, the company, and the then-mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, soon had the factory back up, churning out legions of the homely little cameras.
These come in a variety of tempting lens types: pinhole, fisheye, panoramic and panning, as well as several trick lenses, such as multiframe, action, robot and split.
There's also the Diana Box camera made by the Big Wall Plastic Factory of Kowloon, Hong Kong. This camera is famous for its light leaks, which in the plastic camera world are often considered a plus, since they can add interesting streaks and color effects. If, however, your Diana is too leaky with more streaks and colors than the northern lights, you can remedy the situation with some strategically applied duct tape, seen in some circles as a bandage of honor.
When the Diana was first manufactured in the 1960s, it sold for under $3 and was commonly given away as a reward at skill games at carnivals, or with fill-ups at gas stations.
The Holga was similarly distributed during the 1980s and found favor with some professional photographers. Introduced in 1982, it was mass-marketed as a cheap camera for working-class Chinese.
Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Konica and Fuji all have their fixed-lens, point-and-shoot plastic cameras. America has the Fisher-Price Kodak and Polaroid Big Shot, which was a favorite of Andy Warhol — he used it in celebrity sittings for his famous silk-screened portraits.
Diana and Holga reproductions have achieved a kind of cult following. And LOMO has a Web site where the rules of Lomography instruct users to have fun and ignore all rules.
Enthusiasm for these little film cameras is seen as a reaction against the perfection and ease of digital photography. Most exhibits with these cameras are organized with the images pinned up in a continuous, unbroken chain, unadorned by frames, captions or credits.
Summer challenge
The exhibit the Akron museum has organized is based on a call issued last summer for work similar to that of Andy Warhol (people and pop culture), Cindy Sherman (self-portraits), Diane Arbus (freaks and geeks), Ansel Adams (landscapes) or Weegee (life on the street).
Entrants were limited by only one rule: They had to use a plastic camera. They were also asked to indicate which photographer they were emulating.
The museum's view is that asking entrants to create works based on artists in its collection serves as a teaching tool, and engenders a feeling of ''ownership'' and connection between participants and the museum.
Museums like to tell themselves little fairy tales like this, but truly, only the person who gives a whole bunch of money and/or art works to a museum actually gets to have any sense of ownership. The most an average person would feel from emulating a work in a museum is familiarity, which is one of the most widely accepted teaching tools in art appreciation classes.
Besides, the only thing many of the entrants seem to have learned about the museum's collection is what organizers told them each category represents.
For instance, few entrants in the Cindy Sherman category seemed to know that Sherman did anything more than take self-portraits. She's in fact best known for dressing up as famous people or art works and photographing herself as, say, the Mona Lisa, Madame de Pompadour, Lucille Ball or unnamed actresses in 1950s-style film stills.
By doing this, Sherman makes us aware of the conventions of images, periods and forms, as well as the female stereotypes found in certain periods in history and how our own era's female stereotypes compare. Most entrants in this category, however, simply took pictures of themselves and let it go at that.
Weegee (life on the street), to cite another category that fell somewhat short of expectations, was known for his dogged pursuit of police stories, sleeping across the street from a Manhattan precinct with a police radio at his bedside. He was also not above staging images, such as his most famous, The Critic, in which he arranged for an intoxicated barfly to stand near the drop-off point for high-society women dressed in all their finest, and glare at them as they attended the Diamond Jubilee opening night of the Metropolitan Opera.
The voyeuristic elements with which Weegee imbued his photographs is lacking in the plastic camera images, as is his sense of incongruity between the rich and poor, the victims and the rescued, the guilty and the barely innocent.
The Diane Arbus (freaks and geeks) category seemed commonly to consist of images of various kid brothers mugging for the camera.
Successful categories
The Ansel Adams category is the most successful of the five, as well as the most popular. Several innovative and insightful images are included here, but it must be said that Adams' work is more popular in our area than all the others combined.
The Andy Warhol category was also quite successful, which is not that much of a surprise, as Pop Art is the most popular modern art form, and after Impressionism, the most widely attended type of art exhibit.
What one brings away from this exhibit is a feeling that the Akron museum may have steered participants wrong by suggesting categories while requiring them to use the little plastic cameras.
After all, the purpose of cheap cameras, as stated on the Lomography Web site (http://www.lomography.com), is to be spontaneous and carefree, to have fun and not to plan one's images, but shoot from the hip or at arm's length, on the run or on a whim, without composing, even on occasion without looking through the viewfinder.
To do that while trying to shoot pictures like Sherman, Arbus, Adams, Warhol and Weegee seems not just contradictory but inane. Given such a muddled concept, it's a wonder there were so many participants. Museum Registrar Arnold Tunstall said there were more than 100 entrants and around 200-plus images on display.
All of which seems to be the result of a kind of inverted cultural logic: American consumers don't always read directions, nor are we known for doing our homework or backing up our beliefs with either facts or research.
Looked at in that light, this was the perfect show.
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
Art and fashion share many things, but first and foremost, the two modes of expression share fads — momentary enthusiasms for particular artists, styles or gimmicks because so-and-so in New York (Los Angeles, London, Paris, Barcelona) says they're cool.
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