Sentimental artifacts
The tutorial began with show and tell: the ancestors of the Olympus E-P1.
Grandpa Pen
Father Pen
And the family picture.
And here’s Cousin Lumix.
(Ironically these photos were taken with a camera phone as I was engrossed in the dimsum.)
People crack jokes about the inordinate attachment of the Japanese to cameras. There’s the stock character of the Japanese tourist with three cameras hanging around his neck. Uro says their love of cameras has to do with recent history. After World War II Japan was in shambles, and the production of cameras helped them to rebuild their economy. Their parents and grandparents worked in camera factories; those cameras literally kept them alive. Today many Japanese buy vintage cameras because these may have been put together by their ancestors’ hands. Uro recalls going into a camera shop in Tokyo where the old proprietor examined his vintage camera, exclaimed that he had that same type of metal pin, took it out of a drawer, and presented it to the customer with tears in his eyes. (True, as a writer and camera fanatic, Uro may be sentimental about other people getting sentimental about cameras.) Cameras are not merely gadgets, but artifacts that create artifacts.
Uro’s photography club is giving a series of workshops at Silverlens.