I remember getting my LC-A in the post, as if Santa couldn’t be bothered to turn up personally and had sent everything out by mail. Second-hand from ebay, wrapped in a brown envelope. I remember the disappointment when I realised it wasn’t working as it should have been. But I remember the trepidation of opening it up and fixing it. I remember the thrill of thinking I could get something as dreamy as those other LC-A pictures I’d seen on Flickr, and I remember that sense of joy from getting the first cross-processed roll back with colours like an underwater merry-go-round.

Looking back, I’d say I was excited because… because it felt like this thing was alive and out of my control.

In my younger days, I’d had a few film cameras, played with my Dad’s SLR, done some lunchtime darkrooming. But maybe I was too young back then, still way too focused on trying to make sense of the world, rather than see it through a lens. Something was clicking, but it was generally only the shutter release… Years later, I picked up a Digital SLR (which I still love to use), and I set about about recapturing those moments of capturing, re-finding each moment, and re-learning what all those buttons and dials did. I’m still learning, but in so many different ways now.

There are some amazing photos on Flickr – that was something I discovered quickly. But what really stood out were those in the Lomo group – those stark pop colours, those compositions managing to hit the right side of both dynamic and gritty. Surreal, but also intriguingly beautiful.

And so I ended up with an LC-A. The Rules of Lomography had sucked me in, with their careless flouting of the rules of calculation and thought, and instead injecting something else, something much needed: passion. That sense of natural spontaneity that it’s so difficult to obtain the more complicated a camera is. Think less. Judge less. Enjoy more.

From there, the lo-fi slope was greased up with development fluids. I fell in love with what was coming out of the Holga groups as well, and I fell in love with medium format, and ever more so with film in general: that cylindrical egg where pictures will settle like butterflies, and the matching cage where they’re sealed away, ready to be re-born into the world. The teasing hints of a negative against the light; the chemical smell of film surface; the click of wheels as they mesh with sprockets somewhere inside, as if to draw attention to the understated tick of the camera’s eventual moment when everything come together. Everything builds up to the split-second in which the aperture opens to permit a single drop of light through, and something precious – time itself – is made yours.

I ended up becoming a junkie, scouring ebay for whatever looked intriguing and wasn’t too pricey. Some TLRs, an Ensign box cam, a 6×9 neg British Bakelite contraption, a Diana+, even another LC-A to replace the first. – the list continues to grow. Each had their own peculiar character, their own way of seeing the world. It was as if each of them gave me a new way of seeing reality, and presented me with a fresh challenge for how we go about finding that single image, that moment when everything comes together. Wind or don’t wind. Look forward, look down – or don’t even look at all…

For me, this constant shifting of perspectives helps keep me on my toes, always moving around so that I never rest and start taking the world for granted. Every situation is a new one, every thought is original. We can place too much technology in between us and what we’re looking at, and then we’re away with the fairies – we start seeing the world as a photograph. We ask what lens it was taken on, how many pixels it has in it, and just what f-stop happened to be in place at the time? These are good questions, if you want to take a photograph – and sometimes I do.

But a lot of the time, I don’t care about this stuff. I want a story about reality, not a description or an essay, and here my toy cameras conspire with me against that concept of “technical excellence”. Together, we construct a world that is out of this world – a vague reflection of life that hides away its true miracles through an army of techniques: via vignetting, via light leaks, and with brash, screaming colours and abstract focus. We can never hope to truly recreate the original experience – this has been and gone. But often in recollection, the less we say about it, the more we can imagine being there.
Maybe then, this is about breaking free – freedom from the idea that the more we can control our view, the more beauty we will be able to squeeze out of it. Beauty lies in the uncontrollable, in the chaotic, and in the unexpected, and toy cameras will always bring that back to me. To finish with the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson:

“There are thousands of ways to distill the essence of something that captivates us; let’s not catalogue them. We will, instead, leave it in all its freshness…”

More From Graham on his blog and flickr stream