Holga Magic
By Rachael Ashe
Holga. It sounds like a river in Russia; it's actually a cheap plastic Chinese camera... with the emphasis on cheap. A couple months ago a friend bought one on impulse. He treated it as a toy and soon became frustrated with its limitations. Lucky for me, because I've had the benefit of working with it ever since. I've come to think of the Holga as a 'fine arty' camera.
While the rest of the world is moving forward into the digital age, shooting with the Holga is taking a technological step back in time. The shutter speed is alleged to be 1/100. The aperture choices are f8 or f11, that's it. Three focusing choices are indicated by icons; "mountain" for distance, "small group of people" for medium range, "little person" for close. The lens, like the camera body, is made of plastic. Yet the Holga uses medium format 120 film, the film preferred by professional fashion and architecture photographers. The cost of buying and developing three rolls of 120 film is about equal to the cost of the actual camera.
Once you accept the humble Holga's limitations there is magic to be had. You have to accept you can never know quite what's going to happen. Because you have such limited control over exposure, I've found the best conditions for taking pictures with it seem to be bright sunlight. At least then I feel comfortable I'll capture something on film.
Window too was taken in the Skybar in Vancouver . It was an impulse; the many lines of the window and the curtain appealed to me, and the light seemed bright enough to fulfill the camera's speculative exposure requirements. At that point I was still naively looking through the viewfinder to compose the image.
I know better now. I no longer bother looking through the camera's dubious viewfinder to compose the photograph. Holga viewfinders are frequently completely out of alignment with the lens. Composing an image is based on guesswork supported by experience. Each Holga is uniquely deformed, so the photographer has to adapt to the camera. I now point the camera in the general direction of the subject and angle it according to my camera's particular bent. I can visualize the shot I am taking to a certain degree, but there is also a lot of luck and faith involved.
Holga photographs have a very distinctive look to them - distorted, surreal, and depending on the subject, the dated look of family photos taken by cheap cameras in the fifties. The edges always vignette to varying degrees and the depth of field is often distorted in strange ways, all due to aberrations in the poor quality of the plastic lens. Robson Square was taken as I was sitting on the steps having lunch and enjoying the sun. I'd been hoping to photograph people with the Holga and decided to take a sneaky shot of the woman and her very cute daughter as they sat near me.
Part of the attraction of using the Holga is seeing how the camera's innate eccentricities translate the reality of a scene. On the way home was taken as I walked home from work. I love those flowers and wanted to capture the fallen petals and the shadows on the ground. I realized after I'd taken the shot that I'd set the focus on "mountain" rather than "small group of people." This happy accident gives the shot an extra dose of the surreal. It turned an ordinary shot into something extraordinary.
There's no instant gratification from the Holga. It takes a few days to get the results of the shots (my local film lab doesn't process 120 film on site). Waiting to get the contact sheet to see how the photographs turned out creates a delicious sense of anticipation. I'm always excited to see which images have turned out.
The emptiness of the playground in "Where have all the children gone?" struck an instant chord with me. I was learning to see the world in Holga terms; it felt like perfect Holga imagery. The shot turned out compositionally as I'd visualized but the high contrast lighting and lack of human presence created an extra dose of moody atmosphere I hadn't anticipated.
I really love working with this quirky little camera. There is a new world of photographic possibilities to be explored through the Holga's distinctive vision.
Editorial note: To see more of Rachael's Holga work, please visit her flickr set Holga Crap Shoot.
