| All the photographs on these pages were taken with the Diana Camera, a cheap plastic camera from the 1960's, that was originally sold in toy stores. I got my first one when I was seven years old through the Bazooka Joe Bubblegum Comics. I shot some film, still have a couple of the original prints, and eventually forgot about it till many years later while attending Art School. The Diana with all its wonderful flaws - soft focus, vignetting, light leaks, and a total disregard of all the technical qualities of "good" photography, seemed like a natural tool for someone with a punk D.I.Y. attitude. |
| People either seem to love or hate the Diana Camera, and many can not understand why you would use a toy to do serious work. Using a Diana makes you work in a totally different way; formal concerns aren't as important, and you begin to rely on intuition more and more. Eventually the Diana became my main image making tool, and has been for over ten years. |
| I started to use the Diana camera in the early Eighties, but it was just one of my many alternative tools, which included pinholes, Kodak Brownies (until they stopped making that 127 size film), old stereo cameras from the 1950's, painting, drawing, not to mention cheap video and bad music. It wasn't until I moved to Los Angeles in 1989, and was a student at The Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, that I began to concentrate on using this camera as my main tool. |
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Any questions or comments, please drop me a line
toycamera@huskudu.com
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