Note sull'episodio
A machine imagined so that a man would never have to show his face, which became the camera, of the whole twentieth century, that taught photographers to show theirs.
The founding legend starts in the mud of the First World War, with a trench periscope: a tube and two mirrors that let you see without being seen. A German engineer named Reinhold Heidecke looked at that principle and thought: that should be a camera. His employer said no, so after the war he built it himself, and at the end of 1928 the world met the Rolleiflex. Today, for the first time on this show, not a photographer's story, a camera's story. (And yes, I can hear Eve Arnold objecting from two episodes ago. She's right, forever: no box ever made anyone an artist. But some tools change the person holding them, and this odd little box is the clearest example I know.)
Full disclosure: I've never owned one. Never even shot one. I've wanted one for years. I think it's one of the most beautiful objects ever manufactured. What it does to you: a reversed image that makes you negotiate with the frame, one eternal square, twelve frames to a roll, a shutter that whispers. But the real magic is posture. Every other camera rises to your eye and replaces your face with a glass one; the Rolleiflex stays at your chest, and to focus it, you incline your head and look down. This is a camera that makes you bow to the person you photograph. Now you know why Eve Arnold's little Rolleicord, the budget twin, the little sister, mattered so much. And she's one hand among many: a secret nanny in Chicago named Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus ("terribly hyped on clarity"), Astrid Kirchherr and five scruffy young musicians from Liverpool, a bowing Queen, James Dean aiming a borrowed one back at his own teacher.
And the companies that built it died three times: 1981, 2009, 2014. And the cameras didn't notice. Ninety-year-old Rolleiflexes are out there right now, quietly making twelve squares at a time, because the idea inside them never went out of date: see the world without walling yourself off from it.
Your move this week: once, photograph from the bow. Camera or phone at your chest, screen tilted up, head inclined, face open: one photograph like that. And if you don't shoot at all, just watch what cameras do to people this week: the wall going up when a phone rises, and the rare, lovely opposite.
Coming Saturday: everything these weeks have been circling, Eggleston's ordinary treasures, Arnold's honesty, this bowing little box, walked straight into the present. Your phone makes technically perfect pictures; a photograph from 1936 still feels heavier. Where the weight went, and how you get it back.
Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com