The Street, Its Peoples: Box Camera Photography

“Poor images are thus popular images—images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission.”

– Hito Steyerl, In Defence of the Poor Image

In the photobook Box Camera NOW which traces contemporary practitioners of box camera photography, Lukas Birk repeatedly emphasises the haptic qualities of the process. The contraption which combines the lens and the darkroom within a box is assembled in myriad ways with locally available materials; the design is often personalised by the photographers; the setting and process is inherently improvisational and contingent; and the subject is mostly fleeting and strange, a collection of bystanders, passersby and pedestrians. Box camera photography—which enfolds the development and usage of self-made cameras that require little more than a box, lens, developing trays and a moveable glass—is instant, mobile and frequently outdoors (daylight helps reduce the exposure time). Birk celebrates the inexpensive assembly of the box camera, its propensity towards public spaces (markets, streets, popular tourist destinations etc.), its mobility (his website advises weight requirements of the equipment for air travel), and its contribution to making photographic memorabilia affordable. He invokes the long and widespread histories of the box camera—known as “Kamra-e-Faoree” in Afghanistan, “Lambe Lambe” in Brazil and “Camera Minuteros” in Spain.

 

The box camera photographer of the past performed an array of functions for the middle and lower classes, developing an archive of economic and geographical mobility. In Birk and Sean Foley’s Afghan Box Camera Project, one can explore how, through the twentieth-century, the instant photographs of box cameras contributed towards the creation of a dispersed archive of the seismic shifts in migration and labour. This includes producing identity photographs, tracing class aspirations in tourist sites, capturing narratives of mobility outside administrative buildings, building family histories through portable studios as well as bringing photographic documentation and enactment to communities and classes otherwise excluded.

 

Looking at the collection of images in Box Camera NOW, the box camera photographer of today is the ethnographer of the ordinary, the documentarian of faces in the crowd, the itinerant recorder of peripatetic bodies. Predominantly featuring portraits of people in transition, the collection raises the question: what, besides the “mystical” aura of the analogue and the nostalgia for handmade, is the function of box camera photography?

In a time when digital photography is three times as cheap and “fata fat” (fast) as Bharath Bhushan Mahajan describes it, it is illuminating to think of what Birk terms as “Poor Photography.” In the vein of Julio García Espinosa’s characterisation of “Imperfect Cinema,” Hito Steyerl describes it as a counter practice which “…insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic… Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.”

To learn more about the Afghan Box Camera, please search for “Box Camera NOW: Lukas Birk’s Afghan Box Camera Project.”

All images from Box Camera NOW by Lukas Birk. Fraglich Publishing, 2020.