The following is hung next to my work at the Moseley Exchange. I’ve posted it here with links and photos of the piece in situ.

In the Summer of 2006 I was at a Flickrmeet. This is where members of the photo sharing website Flickr meet up for a walk taking photos of the city.

This particular meet took place in Digbeth and one of our number, Stuart Parker, was pointing his camera into a strange cardboard tube with a 1950s Kodak Duaflex camera stuck to the bottom of it. He had recently joined a nascent community of Flickr users taking photographs through the viewfinders of other cameras, a practice given the logical name of Through the Viewfinder or TTV. We were all a bit amused and skeptical of this oddness until he posted the photos to the group. Then we wanted to have a go too.

The next month six of us turned up armed with vintage cameras with cardboard taped to them and for a while Birmingham was the TTV capital of the world. As always happens most of the gang dabbled for a bit before moved on to other things, but something about TTV got me hooked. I loved the restrictive nature of the machine. Unlike the simple point and click of a normal camera a TTV shot requires work to get right. Because of a mirror the image is flipped so you have to move right to move left, as it were. There’s no zoom and everything is seen from the point of view of a five year old. It’s like photographing with your arms tied behind your back, especially in a dark music venue.

Then there’s the building of the thing, easily achieved with a cardboard box and some gaffer tape but open to endless modifications. There’s a bit of science to the art, figuring out how the light moves through the device, what causes the effects and imperfections and why certain close-up lenses work differently to other close-up lenses, a a lot of guesswork and luck. I often get contacted by baby TTVers and their cries are always the same. “Why doesn’t this work?” with a subtext of “why can’t I give up on it?” It can be addictive, building your own lens. And once you’ve figured that out there’s the look of your contraption which will draw curious looks and comments. While others go for something more shiny or crafty I like the gaffer tape aesthetic which is reflected in the work on show here.

But mostly it’s the images. There’s just something about them. Folks often mention up the vintage feel or invoke the dread Lomo (the shit camera sold in Urban Bloody Outfitters for obscene sums of money to people who can’t use eBay to find shit cameras) but it’s not that. For a start there’s no film involved – it’s a digital photograph of a piece of glass. The term Through the Viewfinder is actually a misnomer. You’re not looking through it, you’re looking at it, which gives a flatness to the image, like photographing a cinema screen, conflated with the curvature of the glass.

Over the years I’ve used a lot of different cameras. I love my Nikon FM2 film camera, the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim shitcam is a lot of fun and the Olympus XA2 a subtle delight, but I never get bored of the round squares.

The photos in this exhibition range from August 2006 to December 2009, all taken with the TTV contraption also on show here. On December 21st I was on the top floor of the Sainsburys carpark in Kings Heath. I slipped on the slushy, oily ice and my digital camera went skittering along the concrete making that clacking noise that electronics make telling you they ain’t coming back from this one. I knew it was over. Over three years and four months I’d taken photos in suburbs, at music gigs, in art sculptures, at festivals, in pubs, at weddings, on countryside walks, all over Digbeth (ah, Digbeth, my muse) and elsewhere with this this hunk of cardboard over a vintage Kodak Duaflex II with a Fuji Finepix S7000. But no longer.

The final photo taken with that contraption is in the bottom right corner, looking over Kings Heath towards Stirchley.

Strangely I wasn’t sad and quickly built a new contraption using a slightly older Duaflex I to work with my Nikon D70s, something I’d been planning for years but had never had the motivation to actually do. These new photos are different. Crisper, for a start, and the new ‘trap doesn’t lend itself to long exposures just yet. It all feels a little transitional, to be honest. I’m exploring new possibilities and realising new limitations and that’s a good thing.

But it’s time to say goodbye to an old friend and this work is a memorial.

Pete Ashton
March 1st 2010