“Pictures… are not just inert objects, but lively, active forms that engage us on a deeply emotional level, often in ways that we do not fully understand or control.” (W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?)
Earlier this month, I walked the whole way down Madison Street from Madison Park to the Waterfront, and then through Pike Place, which is something I wanted to do before I ever heard of the new Rapid Ride Route G that very nearly does the same thing. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to test out the Belomo Agat18K half-frame camera.
I’d specifically asked the lab to scan these two 1/2-frames per scan, thinking they’d be side-by-side with a split down the middle like an open book, but little comrade had other disorienting plans, giving each image more of a motion picture feel. So, I decided to lean on that look this time around and present these with creative crops at 1:1, like stolen scenes from some found Super-8.
“Images are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with legendary or mythical status, a kind of potential energy waiting to be released.” (W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?)
I don’t remember where I first saw this little plastic fantastic but I watched a few YouTube videos to figure out how it works before I bought one, because loading and using one looked like a Cold War mystery to me. I also couldn’t wrap my head around its orientation and thought that the half-exposures would split the standard 35mm frame along a vertical axis, with a diptych image on either side, but the scans I got back look nothing like that. If I had more of an engineer’s mind, I’d probably have understood the winding mechanism better, since the whole contraption is very primitive when you open and load it up, but that’s not how me brain works, me. Monkey click, monkey see.
“The modern era is defined by a shift from the dominance of language and textual representation to that of images — a ‘pictorial turn’ that makes images central to the production and understanding of knowledge.” (W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory)
The images I got back are surprisingly sharp, but my exposures were all over the place. The camera has this very simple but ingenious way of limiting how wide open you can go based on the ISO you set, but I’m thinking I underestimated just how bright the sun actually is when following the sunny-16 “rule” (I use air quotes because I just went with my gut). I feel like I tend to assume that scenes are a lot darker than they are, because the shots I took that I thought were going to be underexposed came out perfect, whereas well-lit scenes came out like the surface of Venus.
There’s probably some metaphor in all of that about psychosomatic states of mind, but this is a great little camera to practice reading the light more accurately with my eye.
“Images are both symptoms and instruments of social power. They are ways of imposing certain views of the world, but also ways of contesting those views.” (W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory)
I was mostly concerned about getting things in focus with this camera and didn’t anticipate how tricky it would be to expose correctly, but that adds to the frenetic feel of this roll.
I actually think the Agat makes for a great street camera because it’s so small and unobtrusive, it barely draws any attention. And the handful of times that people did notice it, they seemed to find it interesting; some smiled and one person even mouthed “wow” to themself. That could mean anything, but I decided that they were from Belarus and recognized little broski.
“Images don’t stand still for their viewers; they have lives of their own, interweaving with language, moving back and forth between the visible and the invisible, the readable and the unreadable.” (W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology)