Rummaging through "trash"

The best tool does not necessarily look good, just as the best character does not always shine at the first sight. Rummaging through the used cameras on ebay often feels to me like reading through a unbound history book with all its pages messed up. Finding a good yet cheap camera is like finding an alternative voice in this history book. It is full of quiet excitement and a sense of self appreciation. Isn't it true that when you find something that is not always expensive, yet good, you are finding a life philosophy of making good out of something ordinary and something that is grounded within everyday.

This partially defaced RICOH R1 is like such a buried beauty to me. Not a super famous brand name, the look of a point-and-shoot camera, a museum piece of having to use film, R1 can be a quiet camera that relieve the shooters from the burden of focus and adjusting. At the same time, its super good lens, especially for black and white film that does not care about the color rendition, can be an inexpensive gem for me.  

My ethnographic work in China will begin in about two weeks. I need a camera that is low-profile and casual in looking so that I can be as unobtrusive as possible. The sleek body of R1 means that I can simply slip it in my pants' pocket. The best thing of all, its wide angle lens of 30 mm means that I can take indoor pictures with the whole body of the subjects. As a surplus, it has a panorama mode in which the lens will change to 24 mm in its focal length. For a beautiful place of Yunan, this feature is definitely a good addition.

In this last picture of the reclining beauty, you can see the buttons and a small screen of the controls and feed backs for this camera. R1 was actually targeted to the serious photographers at its launch. Often is used by these rich and/or crazy professionals as the back-up camera. For a poor man like me, it is expected to be the main camera to produce poster size black and white prints. Embedded in its design is a philosophy that is easier for Asian people to identify with: It is like a good cutting knife that does not look menacing. Like a mature person, it knows how to contain its edge and power.   

Introduction: Photography: A middle-brow art

"[E]ven when the production of the picture is entirely delivered over to the automatism of the camera, the taking of the picture is still a choice involving aesthetic and ethical values: if, in the abstract, the nature and development of photographic technology tend to make everything objectively "photographable", it is still true that, from among the theoretically infinite number of photographs which are technically possible, each group chooses a finite and well-defined range of subjects, genres and compositions . . . so that the most trivial photograph expresses, apart from the explicit intentions of the photographer, the system of schemes of perception, thought and appreciation common to a whole group" (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 6).