Canberra Museum and Gallery
Nigel’s Cameras Collecting as an expanded universe The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. 1 Philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s reflections on collecting came in the process of unpacking and sorting through his boxes of library books after they had been in storage for two years. His remarks have a particular resonance in considering the plastic camera collection of artist and art historian Nigel Lendon. Canberra Museum and Gallery has exhibited the private collections drawn from members of the local community for over twenty years. As a relatively new collecting institution in a young city, these exhibitions have nurtured a broader conversation on the nature of collecting and how what we collect
reveals diverse ideas of value and significance. The purposeful accumulation of things to form a collection is something many of us do. Artists, in particular, are known for their assembling of objects in ways that often defy conventional understandings. A recent exhibition at the Barbican in London displayed the possessions of inveterate artist collectors including Andy Warhol, Martin Parr and Damien Hirst, charting their disparate strategies and ways of using and holding onto objects. 2 Lendon’s own collection is needle sharp in focus - cameras made predominantly with plastic in the twentieth century. This simple definition belies the multiplicity of stories and significance of this group of objects – all of them mass-produced for the same functional purpose – to facilitate the making of a photographic image. The majority were acquired in the late 1970s and early 80s with the intention that they would form the basis of a research project. Lendon perceptively saw then the significance of plastic as a material
that fundamentally changed society in the Twentieth Century. With little documentation or other collections available, he sought to construct his own ‘magic circle’ to understand this phenomenon. But new tasks and opportunities emerged and the cameras were put away - safely wrapped in newspaper, nestled in plastic milk crates and stacked in storage. They moved with the artist around his different homes, most recently to Wamboin just outside Canberra, where they stayed, thankfully in dry crisp air, until October 2018. Unwrapping them now, both physically and in a curatorial process with the research assistance of Antonino Neilfi, has brought Lendon’s initial instinct for the significance of plastic into a more urgent focus. As the world now considers plastic, or more precisely plastic waste, to be one of the greatest threats to the planet, this collection shows just how designers have worked with the material to seduce and entice. The collection also has significance for how it demonstrates the initial rise of creating the tool for mass personal image making which has now
Graphic design for the owner’s manual of the Seventy-Five 1954. Argus Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A. Camera Design Harley J Earl 1949
proliferated further with the advent of the smart phone. We are also alert now to see how how marketing and design combined to gender a range of cameras that enticed women to make images of family life within the home. The collection has parallels to Lendon’s own art practice, which privileges the industrially made object over the evidence of the hand of the artist. Alongside the more conventional display, Lendon has assembled a group of cameras into a sculptural form. 3 At the conclusion of the exhibition, a Perspex
column contains a diverse jumble of cameras to form an imposing tower. This intervention into his own collection, perhaps an allusion to the metaphoric pedestal that Benjamin describes, speaks as an artistic response that acknowledges a kind of contemporary archaeology of industrial production. A reminder of the accumulation of things and ultimately our ability to know only a small part of their story. Virginia Rigney Senior Curator Visual Art CMAG
1.. Walter Benjamin ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’ originally published in German 1931 Translated in Illuminations - Essays and Reflections Trans Harry Zhon, ed. With introduction by Hannah Arendt ( New York Scholcken Books 1969 p 60 2.. Lydia Yee Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector Barbican Arts Centre 2015 3. Nigel Lendon Bonjour Mousier Arman, acquired cameras, Perspex 2019 The dating of the cameras was primarily conducted on the basis of auction records and James M. McKeown & Joan C. McKeown. Price Guide to Antique and Classic Cameras, Eleventh Edition, 2001-2002. Grantsburg, Wis: Centennial Photo Service, 2001.
Plastics and photography: entwined histories Belgian émigré Leo Baekeland discovered Bakelite in New York in 1907, following a long period of experimentation which was made possible by the earnings derived from the sale of the patent for a new photographic printing paper, ‘Velox’, that he had developed and sold in 1899 to George Eastman, the founder of Kodak. The iconic camera manufacturer saw in this invention an unmissable opportunity to further his own project of popularisation of amateur photography, which had begun in 1888 with the introduction of flexible roll-film. Baekeland’s new printing paper gave hobbyists a higher degree of control over the development of their own pictures, which could now be processed under gas-light instead of natural light. Now, with the patenting of Bakelite in 1909, Baekeland presented to the world a new material that was soon to revolutionise commercial design and manufacturing, and which overcame the technical limitations of
older plastics, such as celluloid and ebonite. Introduced in the 1880s, these organic thermoplastics were brittle, unstable, prone to melting and laborious to produce. Baekeland’s plastic, on the contrary, was versatile, resistant, chemically stable, cost-effective and easy to manufacture with consistent quality. Bakelite quickly became popular and began to be widely used across all industries: automobile constructors produced Bakelite distributor caps (starting with the Model T Ford), radiator caps, steering wheels and door handles; the Parker pen company began selling Bakelite fountain pens in solid and marbleized colours; furniture shows exhibited brass bed frames lacquered in the new plastic; and radio makers used this material broadly to produce cheaper appliances. In 1924, Baekeland established the Bakelite Corporation, which consolidated to the public the status of this new plastic as ‘the material of a thousand uses.’ In September that year, he was featured on the frontpage of Time, as ‘the father of plastics.’ In the following years, camera manufacturers too adopted Baekeland’s
invention, to create a new generation of cheaper cameras. Initially used as an inexpensive replacement for traditional materials such as wood, steel and leather, its inherent properties of mouldability began to be appreciated by the emergent profession of industrial designers. As the Lendon collection reveals, Kodak was the first to adopt Baekeland’s invention in his semi-professional Model 1-A Autographic Special camera (1915). From the late 1920s onwards, Bakelite-body cameras begun to be produced and Kodak introduced their first plastic camera, the Hawkette, in 1930. The new material offered designers and inventors such as Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy and Fritz Kaftanski, key figures whose work is featured in this collection, the ideal medium to provide consumers with affordable products that could be both practical and attractive. Raymond Loewy (1893 – 1986) was one of the most prominent American Industrial Designers of the Twentieth Century. Born in France, Loewy moved to New York in 1919, where he briefly
worked as a fashion illustrator for Vogue. In 1929 Loewy began his work as an industrial designer and established his own consulting firm in New York and London, popularising his trademark ‘streamlined’ aesthetic at the two shores of the Atlantic. Defined as ‘beauty through function and simplification’, streamlining was characterised by smooth lines and surfaces, simplified forms and dynamic geometries. His firm seamlessly applied this style across diverse industries, from transportation to furniture, from refrigerators to photographic appliances. Often presented as ‘restyling’ of popular products, Loewy’s designs appealed to consumers as they emphasised ease of use as well as aesthetic appeal. Most interestingly, the Lendon collection illustrates how the style crossed over with industrial areas that dealt mainly with speed, and thus created a dialogue between the most disparate products in the consumerist and transportation industries. The smooth geometries of the Purma Special Camera of 1937, for example, recall those of the Baldwin
diesel locomotives Loewy restyled for the Pennsylvania Railway in the same year. The smooth metal curves and porticullis front door of the Anscoflex and Anscoflex II cameras of 1957, playfully bring to mind the pre-WWII home appliances such as the Maytag Model E washing machine by Harold van Doren. These cameras are important examples of the widespread optimism of American society on the cusp of the economic boom of the 1960s. Walter Dorwin Teague (1883 – 1960) also extensively worked in industrial design and corporate identity for American corporations. Trained as an artist, Teague begun as a graphic designer and typographer in New York in 1908. In 1926 he opened his own firm and began working as an industrial designer. As had happened to Baekeland, the camera industry also proved crucial for Teague’s professional success when Kodak became his first corporate client in 1928. It was a longlasting collaboration that would stretch well into the 1950s. At Kodak, Teague established his own original approach to consumer design, by
giving equal attention to packaging and product. In the collection of the National Gallery of Australia you will find his first Kodak camera, the No. 1A Gift Kodak, which was sold in an elegant cedar box. The camera case was decorated with flat, polychrome Art Deco geometries, which were also repeated on the door and shutter of the camera. In the following years, in between other projects for corporate clients such as Texaco, Marmon automobiles, Boeing airlines and Steinway pianos, Teague designed at least four Bakelite cameras for Kodak, which took on, in part, the streamlined aesthetics made popular by Loewy. Teague’s most characteristic design is evident in the consistent use of vertical and horizontal ribbing and smooth geometric shapes, which he applied to other commercial products. Partly adopted out of necessity, due to the economic restrictions of the Great Depression of 1929, plastic gave Teague the opportunity of creating designs that were both captivating and economical to manufacture. His design masterpieces within the collection
are the Baby Brownie (1934), the Bullet Camera (1937) and the Brownie Hawkeye (1950). One of Teague’s most successful designs for Kodak was the commemorative Bullet Camera, designed for the New York Fair of 1939, which captured the futuristic style and iconic design of the Trylon and Perisphere structures which were built for the fair. Teague’s cameras are characterised by a strong consumerist appeal. The cardboard boxes for his plastic camera cases were almost as important as the cameras themselves. Devised as advertising media, they featured simplified geometric compositions, in keeping with the style of the product they contained. As such, they were meant to capture the attention of the consumer and create a sense of expectancy. Hailed as the ‘industry’s most businesslike artistcollaborator’, Teague’s approach was led by a keen attention to detail and his own conviction that successful design was instrumental to effective business practice. The style of Teague and Loewy influenced other designers and
manufacturers across the world, such as Fritz Kaftanski in Europe and ACMA in Australia. Born in Essen, Germany, Fritz Kaftanski (1899 – 1988) is a lesser known – and yet important figure who set himself apart from the notorious Loewy and Teague. Following his diasporic trek around Europe in the 1930s, Kaftanski established a number of different camera manufacturing companies in Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Britain and Italy (FotoFex, MiniFex, Fex/ Indo, Sida). Unlike the American designers, Kaftanski’s interests were not primarily focused in the development of popular, consumerist aesthetics. Rather, he intended to make photography economically and technically accessible to the broader public and thus used Bakelite extensively. However, this pragmatic approach to camera production was not indifferent to the style and imageries of their time. His cameras, such as the Sida Turf (1938-39), or the Fex/Indo SuperFex (1944) and UltraFex (1946) recall the popular Art-Deco style of Teague’s Kodak cameras. Yet Kaftanski’s products
retain an unequivocal European style, characterised by sharper geometries, with little or no reference to Loewy’s streamlining. This is particularly evident in the simple polygonal forms of the Sida Extra (1938), which appears to be a combination of functional design of the Bauhaus and the solid masses used by Czech post-WWI Rondo-Cubist architects Pavel Janač and Josef Cochol. Although we do not know the name of their designer, his Fex cameras have an almost sci-fi, futuristic character. Kaftanski’s most curious camera was the Stylophot (1955), designed for SECAM in Paris. Loosely resembling a fountain pen, this camera was marketed as a ‘photopencil’ and features a support onto which a pencil or a pen could be mounted. Branded to both the male and female public, this product appealed to the Cold War imagery of espionage, which Ian Fleming had popularised two years earlier in his iconic James Bond novels. The Lendon collection also shows us how the designs and fashions in USA and Europe reached Australia. In Sydney, the styles of
Loewy and Teague surfaced in the cameras produced by the Australasian Camera Manufacturers Australia (ACMA). One of these is the Sportshot Senior Twenty, a streamlined, trapezoidal Bakelite camera made in Australia in 1948. While Kaftanski reinterpreted American aesthetics to produce objects that responded to the European taste, ACMA pragmatically adopted the style of the American designers. While still producing an aesthetically pleasing object, it also prioritised usability and ease of operation. The smooth and curvilinear lines of Loewy’s streamlined style, for example, are used to give form to a simplified, moulded body. Like Teague’s Baby Brownie camera, the Sportshot Senior Twenty has a minimal number of parts, with a two-piece body composed of a hollow bottom and a flat snap-on lid. Teague’s signature vertical ribbing, instead, is applied to the back of the camera, as a stylish and yet practical solution to improve grip when the camera is held with both hands. The camera was manufactured in a range of colours including black, red, brown, olive
and dark green and was packaged in a colourful yellow cardboard case. Although very little is known about ACMA and the designers employed by the company, this camera is an important testimony of the influence of international design on Australian consumer products after WWII. Capturing the spirit of a new era fascinated by future and technology, Loewy’s streamlining was successful as it allowed the production of goods that were both easy to use and to care for. The Art Deco-inspired designs by Teague, instead gave priority to the commercial appeal and captivate the consumer. In Europe, Kaftanski’s designs made the production of cameras as economical as possible, in order to reach the broadest public in countries where the deprivations of war limited the affluence of consumers. In Australia, these different approaches came together in a pragmatic manufacturing style where aesthetic influences were merged with practical solutions. This group of over 200 cameras collected by artist and historian Nigel Lendon not only
illustrates a variety of styles and approaches to consumerist design. Most importantly, it testifies to the creative potential of the connection between style and functionality, aesthetics and use, and ultimately, form and function. Dr Antonino Nielfi
Stylophot sub-miniature camera 1955 SECAM, Paris, France. Black Bakelite body, metal lens faceplate and pencil mount. Designed by Fritz Kaftanski.
Top: 3-D Stereo c.1953 Coronet, Birmingham, U.K. Specklet Bakelite body, metal faceplate and lens mounts. | Bottom: Purma Special 1937-1951 Purma Cameras Ltd., London, U.K. Black Bakelite Body. Design attributed to Raymond Loewy’s London office. | Back Cover: Savoy c.1956 -1965 Herbert George Camera Corp, then Imperial Camera Corp, Chicago. IL, U.S.A. Aqua green moulded plastic body with metalised faceplate.
Form beyond function: why stop now?
This collection of plastic cameras derives from my longstanding interest in modernism and modernity in early 20th century art, architecture and design. My interests began with the social phenomena associated with mass production (utopianism, consumerism) and new industrial materials (aluminium, plastics) that enabled artists, architects and designers to develop a new iconology of modernity. The material itself enabled the forms of mass production that characterised early 20th century industrialism. Plastics, as Dustin Hoffman learned in the 1967 film The Graduate, was the future. Style (via styling, fashion and industrial design) emerged out of the marketing strategies of the new era of mass consumerism that had
initially been stimulated by department store advertising and display. During the 1920s and 1930s many of the key characteristics of modern art and modernity were seamlessly incorporated into mass market products and everyday life. If photographic technology enabled the mass communications that changed the way we saw the world, plastics enabled a boom in popular photography. In the 1970s and ‘80s I was interested in the multiple intersections between high culture and mass communication. Consumerism seemed to predict the advent of globalism and mass communication, and marketing provided a means for the powerful elements of society to project ideologies and appearances – an iconology – in powerful new ways. It seemed to me that the “artists” of this era who had the greatest impact on society, (for example, Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague) were those =who gave shape and form to consumerism. And hence my interest (at the time) in industrial design.
At the same time I discovered that the flea markets of the world were swamped with the plastic artefacts that had been discarded by previous generations. How was it, I asked myself, that plastic, once heralded as the “material of the future” so rapidly fell out of fashion, became cheap and nasty? By the 1970s it had become the essential material of the ‘throwaway society’, and strong economies were driven by conspicuous consumption, a dynamic that generated a continuous demand for a rapid turnover of style in everything from fashion to automobiles to domestic wares. The invention of modern plastics (from Bakelite in 1907 onwards) had enabled designers to rapidly respond to, and indeed cultivate, changing consumer demand. Bakelite, the first completely synthetic plastic, lent itself to the relatively efficient processes of mass production moulding, thus enabling manufacturing to spread worldwide and to become the material of choice for the burgeoning consumer society of the post-war era.
So my interest grew from simple op-shop curiosity in design and material to a more focussed interest in the design characteristics of particular consumer goods – like cameras. As a collector, this one functional product provided a rich set of technological and stylistic variables – from the economics of the production process enabling the cheapest products, to the potential of the material to provide more efficient and stylish consumer artefacts. I realised that the key to my interest was the range of options available to the designer – who unfortunately were mostly anonymous; from mimicry to efficiency, to forms that were streamlined and jazzy. If this was the material of the future, let’s make it futuristic in its appearance! In the 1950s, cameras were made so cheaply they were given away as a product incentive. If you bought Pepsodent toothpaste, you got a camera for an extra 15c. But by the 1960s they were made to be thrown away, and the utopian dream was over. This exhibition begins with a Kodak, the first camera to make use
of the new material of plastics. The exhibition concludes with another contemporary Kodak camera currently sold through box stores worldwide called the “Flash” or the “FunSaver” which advertises itself as a “single use camera” – “ for the ultimate in ease and convenience”. This particular camera embodies in both its design and marketing strategy the growing global problem with plastics. Insofar as the material and process economies of plastics has enabled the global proliferation of popular photography, the idea of plastics as a disposable material rings alarm bells in every dimension of environmental ethics. It is no coincidence that this exhibition begins and ends with the global industrial giant that was Eastman Kodak until the advent of digital photography. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and its patents are now spread across many new enterprises. From the first Box Brownie to the FunSaver the name “Kodak” epitomises the characteristics of mass culture enabled by the invention of plastics. And yet the advent of single use plastics is increasingly recognised as a crucial
risk to the future of the entire ecosystem. In its call to displace personal responsibility for the artefacts of our individual consumption, Kodak’s original slogan “You press the button and we do the rest” now evokes one of the greatest ethical dilemmas the world is currently facing. Nigel Lendon Wamboin 2019
Front Cover: Sportshot Senior Twenty c.1948 ACMA, Sydney, Australia. Burgundy Bakelite body, metal roll film knob and faceplate. | Fulvueflex Synchroflash late 1950s Ross Ensign Ltd., London, U.K. Black Polystyrene plastic body and metal faceplate. | Left Top: Midget c.1937 Coronet Camera Co., Birmingham, U.K. Blue marbleised Bakelite body. | Left Bottom: Box of the New York’s Fair Edition of the Bullet Camera 1939, Kodak, Rochester, NY, U.S.A. Design Walter Dorwin Teague.
An exhibition developed by Canberra Museum and Gallery. 6 April- 27 July 2019 CMAG would like to acknowledge the loan of the Lendon Collection from Dr Pamela Faye McGrath | Photography: Brenton McGeachie | Design: Shaya Dashtinezhad Curatorial Team: Nigel Lendon, Antonino Nielfi, Virginia Rigney | ISBN: 978-0-9872457-9-3
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