The urge to shoot with vintage cameras
is like certain viruses: it lies dormant inside you, then—for no immediately
apparent reason--explodes into activity. One day you are peacefully shooting
with your plastic gee-whiz automatic everything, and the next day you are clicking away with a Contaflex.
Now, as with viruses, the moment
of infection can be years prior to the onset of symptoms. The infection can even
occur in childhood. As a matter of fact, it often does. My I-day occurred on a winter evening in early 1953, when I crawled up on my parents’ bed to look
through a Sears camera catalogue. Breezing past lookalike box cameras,
Leicas priced like cars, and the baffling (is that a camera?) Speed Graphic, I came to a page where lay in wait the Argus
C-4. Was it the futuristic design that took me in? The top shutter speed of 1/300? The gleaming lens with setbacks
like an office tower? Or was it
the idea that this machine could be used to make SLIDES and a following fantasy about relatives oohing and ahhing as my images
followed one another onto a screen?
Whatever, I kept that catalogue
close to hand for the next year, creased open to that special page. The price approached two weeks of my father’s pay, so there was no use dropping hints about it. And after I grew a year older and a Brownie Hawkeye with a flashgun arrived
to console me, I forgot about the C-4. The flash model of the Hawkeye was no slouch: it cost a respect-inspiring
twelve dollars, and it came with two rolls of film and a sort of condom to protect photographic subjects from exploding
flashbulbs. But my bulbs never blew up, no matter how much I hoped for it.
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| The Mighty C4 |
Cut ahead to 1979. I was walking the streets of Manhattan, putting yards of Tri-X through my new auto-exposure Minolta XG-7.
I passed a camera store on West 52nd Street, near the Hilton Hotel. In the window was the brushed-chrome
majesty of a Voigtlander Prominent. Not the old folder, but the 1951 rangefinder
with the killer Nokton on it. It looked just enough like an Argus C-4 to
unite my childhood fantasy with something that had happened in 1976. And those
two factors, combining, set off the entire syndrome of snapping, clicking, and skulking through the streets with musty machines.
What happened in 1976? At that time, I lived in a New York
apartment that, in the 1920s, had been occupied by a VIP: Babe Ruth. The Babe’s living-room window looked out to Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. In the late
afternoon, after the sun had dipped below the New Jersey Palisades, the river competed with the sky for the richer shade of
blue. Lights sparkled from the apartment towers of Fort Lee, headlights traced the Drive, and street
lights flickered on. The sight was so bewitching that I wanted to write a great
poem about it. That didn't work out, so I decided to take a picture. Having
never owned a camera since my Brownie Hawkeye days, I asked my friend Martha to lend me one. She offered a Voigtlander Vito B.
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