Herculaneum

Off to Herculaneum, which is essentially Pompeii for hipsters. It's conceptually similar but less famous and thus more fashionable. Which is why I went there, instead of Pompeii. Fewer tourists; fewer me.

Herculaneum was buried in 79AD by the same eruption that engulfed Pompeii. Back in the superbad seventies the Roman Empire reigned supreme; Emperor Titus came to power, and he finished up the Colosseum, which I remember from this MST3K skit:

Writing in 1884, W Cope Devereux mentions the place only in passing. Literally so - he bypasses it on the way to Pompeii, because there wasn't much to see. The buried town had been rediscovered in the 1700s and had been excavated sporadically until 1875, but in Devereux's time it was overshadowed by Pompeii. Herculaneum was harder to excavate, which will become apparent six paragraphs from now, after I have finished writing about Spider-Man and the limits of human knowledge.

Work at Herculaneum restarted in 1927. The dig was one of Mussolini's prestige projects, and was intended to make Italy great again. The excavations have continued at a measured pace ever since.

I think it's a reference to SSC Napoli, which was founded in August 1926.

The ancient Romans weren't particularly fussed about resettling Herculaneum. The new town that slowly emerged was called Resina, but just like Spider-Man's black suit the name failed to catch on, and so in 1969 the residents voted to revert back to Herculaneum. Which is Ercolano in Italian.

Vesuvius is still an active volcano, which raises the possibility that the modern Herculaneum might one day be buried in ash. Archaeologists of the future will no doubt think that we all drove Fiats, and that our favourite film was "Banco di Credito Popolare".

Wonky education, or a fiendishly clever code? You decide.

If you think about it, the black costume makes sense, because spiders are black, aren't they? They're black and covered in fur. Why shouldn't Spider-Man be black... and covered in fur?

The black suit was introduced in the mid-1980s, as part of a general wave of "darker and edgier" makeovers that were fashionable at the time. It's often assumed that Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns (1986) was the spark that lit the fire - it had the word dark in the title - but although Knight was very influential it was really the culmination of a general trend rather than its genesis. Miller's story postdated Alan Moore's dystopian V for Vendetta, and Moore's work on Swamp Thing and Captain Britain, for example. The brutally unsentimental Punisher dated from the 1970s, at which point it reflected the generally downbeat, anti-heroic tone of films such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish (in the UK, Judge Dredd had been directly inspired by the Eastwood film).

Batman himself had adopted a more gothic tone in the 1970s, and the big multi-comic Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity reboot was published while Miller was still working on his epic. Nowadays The Dark Knight is almost universally praised, but the "darker and edgier" trend it amplified is not remembered fondly. In the cinema dark-and-edgy became hip in the late 1980s but fizzled out in the 1990s; modern superhero blockbusters generally take place in a world where there are a few good men, if only a few.

Does this mean that modern superhero films and thus modern society in general have become trivialised and incapable of critical thought? My impression is that the dark tone of 1970s Hollywood grew naturally from the themes and stories that contemporary filmmakers wanted to explore, whereas the cynicism of (say) Predator 2 or Last Action Hero was essentially an affectation, an optional component akin to the cosmetic spoilers on a car. But it is impossible to write about films without considering the society that produces them. During the years in which R-rated action films were replaced with PG-rated action films there were several bloody wars; and when I think of the supposedly pussified modern world I think of fat Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sitting on the face of a prostitute, farting into her mouth, while she is being filmed for sex tape that will be leaked to the press in order to publicise her reality TV show, for which she will be paid seventeen million dollars. I think of that all the time. Rob Ford is us; we are Rob Ford.

Ultimately I believe that it is not possible to draw a picture of society from its media; that once you dig far enough, there's nothing there; and that instead of actual history, we remember a construction. The traditional view of history as a set of dates and names is oftentimes mocked for its simplicity, but what is the alternative? Human society is an enormously complicated system that moves through time, and we are unable to view it objectively because we are part of it, and a static slice would be as dead and cold as a slice of a human brain. By the time we have passed through history the details are forgotten, and there were so many things we reacted to unconsciously that even a mass of research - as in David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, for example - cannot fill the gaps. Over time, humanity has learned that there is more to the universe than can fit into a single human mind. How can we advance human knowledge in a universe that exhausts the limits of human understanding? Not just the understanding of one intelligent human being, but that of the entire collective intelligence of the human race. Before we can solve the problem of total understanding we need to build a machine which will surpass ourselves... and at this point have I just spewed out the plot of Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Adams' book is a mass of clever wordplay, but at its core is a profound philosophical concept; how can we understand a concept that simply cannot be translated into a form small enough for the human mind to grasp?

This was the last that roll of Fuji Acros; I put in some colour film and shot the image a few paragraphs up a few seconds later.

At its worst darker-and-edgier was cowardly, easy. Nihilism requires no effort or critical thought. Reading through it again, it strikes me that Dark Knight Returns is remarkably nuanced; it isn't a bludgeoning overdose of brutal violence and defeatism, it has a human core and ends on a hopeful note. The (spoilers) deaths of the chief villains are treated as a tragic waste and an empty hollow void respectively. The world of Dark Knight is bleak but capable of goodness, and its society's major deficit is a lack of empathy. The problem with "darker and edgier" is that, once it is escalated to a point where all of society and all the people and everybody and everything is darkly cynical, what next? There can be no tragedy in a world of tragedy. With no contrast, the backdrop simply becomes a bland wash. Real life is complex, evil is almost always undramatic, and quite often it exists only in the eye of the beholder.

But Herculaneum, eh? It's on the regional line from Naples, a short walk downhill from the train station. There's a taxi firm just outside the station that will take you up to Vesuvius, which was cloudy when I went, so I didn't go. I would have ended up with a lot of photographs of mist and rocks.

Herculaneum was originally by the sea; the eruption moved the coast, and in the following image you can see how deeply it was buried:

In theory you could walk quickly around the location in half an hour or so, and it's possible to do a whistle-stop tour of Pompeii and Herculaneum if you rush, although you'd find it difficult to squeeze Vesuvius into the itinerary. One of the advantages of living in Britain is that Continental Europe is only a short, cheap plane ride away, rather than eight hours and eight hundred dollars. But the ruins have survived for almost two thousand years, they will be there next year and the year after that.

Anzio

The gravestones face towards the sea. The soldiers stormed the beach against light resistance, but were unable to push inland. By the time the Allies broke free, Operation Shingle had produced enough casualties to fill three graveyards, and for each gravestone at Anzio and the surrounding area there are many more, scattered in cemeteries back home, wherever that is.

One of two Commonwealth cemeteries at Anzio; this one is a short walk from the train station. The high water mark of a tide stained with blood.

It's hard to put a cheerful gloss on the Anzio landings. They were conceived in late 1943. At the time, the Allies were fighting their way north through Italy, but had been stopped dead at the Gustav Line, a string of mountain fortifications that ran across the middle of the country. Anzio was behind the Gustav Line, and if a surprise landing could be made there the Germans would have to draw forces back from around the Monte Cassino area, which would allow the Allies to punch through. But the preparations for Overlord left too few landing craft and supplies for Anzio, and so the plans were shelved.

Anzio was also a short drive from Rome, which was up the coast, further north. Rome was not the original target, but it seems that Winston Churchill got wind of the plan and pushed for it to be remounted in the hope that the landings might swiftly capture the Italian capital. Shingle then developed a momentum of its own.

Here's Google Earth's rendition of Anzio and the surrounding terrain. Anzio is close to the camera; the Alban Hills are off in the distance, Rome is off to the left:

Command was given to General John Lucas, who will be remembered forevermore as the man who skilfully landed sixty thousand men on 22 January 1944, taking the Germans by surprise, but who then stayed put for several days while the Germans brought up reinforcements.

His orders were vague. He was to "advance on the Alban Hills", and so he advanced inland a few miles, dug out a network of trenches, and stopped. Judging by the official history, he believed that he could defend the beachhead or advance inland, but not do both. The Allied High Command, meanwhile, seemed to be unsure whether Anzio should be a decisive strike or merely a diversion for a larger attack on the Gustav Line, which in practice never took place.

Lucas eventually launched his breakout bid on the night of 29 January, coincidentally just as the Germans were preparing to sweep his forces from the beachhead. The breakout failed. In one incident the 1st and 3rd Ranger battalions were assigned to sneak into the town of Cisterna under cover of darkness, which almost worked; but they ran into a force of Panzers. The Rangers had light weapons and were caught without cover in an open field, and of the 767 sent to take the town only six returned. The eventual German offensive failed to dislodge Lucas, and the battle thereafter turned into a bloody stalemate. Lucas was sent home on 22 February. He was assigned deputy command of the US Fourth Army, which spend the war at home, defending the US West Coast. He died in 1949, at the age of 59.

Ever since then history buffs have debated whether Lucas was a timid commander who wasted a lot of men and equipment or a decent man given an impossible task. On the first day he landed with a force of infantry, but no tanks and very few vehicles. The Germans outnumbered him, and were emplaced in the mountains. Although the Wehrmacht was plagued with problems, their lines of supply were shorter and more secure than those of the Allies. Allied air and naval forces had regional superiority but were hampered by the winter weather, and the general consensus seems to be that Lucas could have taken the Alban Hills but not held them. The Germans would have cut his troops off, leaving Lucas with a skeleton force to hold the beachhead. The battle would presumably have continued as it did in real life, with the cemeteries slightly further inland.

Anzio itself is a pleasant day out from Rome

The breakout from Anzio eventually took place in May, but even then the victory was tainted by controversy. Instead of pushing inland and smashing the Germans, the Allied forces wheeled north towards Rome, which they took on 04 June. This was no doubt heartening to the people back home, but it gave the Germans time to withdraw further north. The fighting in Italy continued right until the very end of the war in Europe. The remaining German forces in Italy only surrendered a week before VE day.

~

Anzio is famous to people of my generation - people slightly older than my generation, people of my older brother's generation, if I had an older brother - from "When the Tigers Broke Free", a song by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd. It was originally going to appear on the band's 1979 album The Wall but was instead held back for the 1982 film. Roger Waters' father, Lt Eric Fletcher Waters, was killed on the morning of 18 February during the second German counter-attack. Roger Waters was a baby at the time and never knew his father. Over the course of Pink Floyd's career this ate away at Roger Waters' well-being until the accumulated resentment exploded all over The Wall and The Final Cut. "When the fight was over / we spent what they had made."

A scan of the after-action report reveals that Waters' Z Company found itself in the path of a widespread German infantry attack, supported by armour, and that neighbouring R Company was unable to assist. Waters (misspelled as Walters) died sometime between 11:10 and 11:30. By coincidence Roger Waters visited the Anzio area a few months before me. It seems a memorial to Eric Waters was unveiled at nearby Aprilia. As far as I can tell this is inside the grounds of a technical college and isn't accessible to the public (as this news story points out).

The American Cemetery at Nettuno. Not a bad place to spend the rest of eternity. Alonzo Bell was presumably killed during the final stages of Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily.

There are three cemetery complexes in the Anzio area. Between them the two Commonwealth cemeteries hold 3,000 casualties; the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial has 7,000 graves, including casualties from the invasions of Sicily and the battles at Salerno. I took the train to Nettuno and then walked to Anzio, which takes about twenty minutes along a straight paved road.

Operation Shingle has some parallels with Operation Chromite, the UN assault of Inchon during the Korean War. In both cases they were landings behind enemy lines, close to a capital city, with the goal of diverting enemy forces from the front lines further south. But Inchon was the main event, and Douglas MacArthur was better-equipped than Lucas. Furthermore Inchon was far to the enemy's rear, and the North Korean forces were thinly-spread. Inchon was a big success, but MacArthur eventually pushed too far into North Korea and was removed from command when it became apparent that he wanted to use nuclear weapons against China.

The odd thing is that both battles are largely forgotten nowadays. Anzio because it was a failure, overshadowed by D-Day; Inchon because it seemed too easy, and took place during a war that has itself been forgotten. They belong to a bygone age of large-scale, opposed amphibious assaults which are unthinkable today. A large amphibious assault force is very vulnerable to a nuclear strike, and when the fighting finally ceases there would not be enough free land to bury the bodies and no-one to bury them.

Naples

Off to Naples, en route to Herculaneum, with a plastic Holga camera and some sturdy walking boots. And an Olympus XA, but that's for another post.

"The first thing we experienced on reaching Naples was the inveterate habit of begging and cheating among the lower classes. Our carriage-driver began by asking three times the amount of the usual fare for driving us to our hotel, and the whole of the way along never once desisted from trying to persuade us that we must pay what he had asked, and perhaps a little more. ... These Neapolitan beggars are as importunate and persistent as a swarm of gnats, and it is almost impossible to get rid of them."

So wrote William Cope Devereux, RN, in his 1884 travelogue Fair Italy. The beggars and cheats still exist, indeed Naples is infamous nowadays for its pickpockets, and for mountains of cancerous toxic waste. Modern Naples is like something from Judge Dredd, or one of those 1970s eco-disaster books, such as Small is Beautiful or Blueprint for Survival. Eventually the whole city will catch fire... and explode, driving the Earth out into space.

During his naval career William Devereux rose to the rank of assistant paymaster on board HMS Gorgon, which spent eighteen months sailing up and down the coast of East Africa fighting the slave trade. Devereux's first book covered his naval adventures. Authors who draw from their own life experiences eventually face the problem of what to write about when they have caught up with their life, and for his second and apparently final book Devereux decided to write about a trip to Italy with his wife in 1883.

Devereux tries to pass the book off as an expose of the gambling fiends of Monte Carlo, but really it's just a waffly diary. So many things are fine and grand. Ernest Hemingway found material for his books by making stuff up and by living more life, but Devereux was not Ernest Hemingway.

By coincidence I found myself following some of his footsteps, one hundred and thirty years later. Much has changed since then. Devereux was ferried about with horse and cart, and Italy was still a young nation. The Vatican city-state did not exist, which was problematic because the Pope didn't want to be an Italian subject, so in a huff successive Popes holed themselves up in the Vatican and refused to leave. The Italian State didn't want to arrest him and throw him in prison on account of him having hundreds of millions of followers.

The world's Catholics presumably hadn't been much use as a military force - otherwise the Pope would still be leader of Italy - but perhaps with time they could have overwhelmed the Italian state with weight of numbers, like the zombies in World War Z. Italy eventually created Vatican City in 1929, although by that time the country had other problems to deal with.

Elsewhere in Europe, Germany was also a young nation, France had recently got over Napoleon III, Spain and Portugal were in decline, Russia's position was akin to someone who had contracted a fatal illness but had not yet developed any symptoms. Across the water, the country of New York had just won a civil war and was busily extending its influence across the rest of the North American continent. Fair Italy was published at a time when the European powers were dividing Africa amongst themselves, with France and Britain emerging as the eventual winners. Germany and Italy got very little out of Africa - Italy was famously humiliated on the field of battle by the Ethiopians - which must have irritated them. Fifty years after Devereux's book Italy again tried to build an empire, with consequences that were ultimately disastrous for Italy.

In Devereux's day Britain was the world's top superpower, a position it had achieved by ruthlessly exploiting first its domestic population and then the population of the rest of the world. It was rather like the Combine from Half-Life II, and because this is real life there was no Gordon Freeman to stop it; not that a lone voice of reason would have been much use in a world of psychopaths. Eventually the European powers fought amongst themselves, twice, wasting all their treasure and killing millions.

A very small number of people profited from European Imperialism. The great mass of humanity suffered, because the majority of people are essentially passive. Britain's superpower status probably explains why Devereux writes his book in absolutes; as a former Royal Navy man he had worked for the armed wing of the masters of the world, the word of an Englishman was the word of God.

On the subject of Naples' people, particularly the women, Devereux has this to say:

In the time of King Bomba's despotism the people really had little else to do than to amuse themselves, for they had then practically no voice or interest in the government of the two Sicilies, and so became careless, luxurious, and indolent - content to live idly on their hereditary means, smoke, gossip, sip their chocolate, eat their macaroni, roll about in their carriages, and wind up their monotonous and useless day at their earthly paradise, the opera, where they gossiped and flirted to their hearts' content. In consequence of this manner of life, the men have become effeminate, and the women have little left of that characteristic grace and beauty that once so distinguished the Neapolitans.

It was with surprise that I gazed upon the canvases and statues of the old masters, and wondered where they obtained their exquisitely lovely models. From history we know that the women of Greece and Rome were noble specimens of their sex, and worthy of imitation; but if in later times, Correggio, Titian, and Fra Angelico, took their models from among their own countrywomen, how lamentably the present race must have deteriorated since their time!

Take that. From what little I have seen of Europe, not much has changed; the women of Italy have the bodies of undeveloped pre-pubescent girls, and generally look as if they have swallowed wasps. Nobody does anything; the kids go to useless schools where they study for useless degrees in useless subjects, at which point they either sign on the dole or start working for a government department that does nothing of worth. They are never challenged or made to do anything genuinely difficult. European culture is bland and empty, and the population grow up stunted and mentally empty, without the capacity for critical thought.

And this was probably the case a hundred, nay a thousand years ago. The problem is that in an environment when the majority of people are passive, it is easy for an active force to take over, which is why Europe has fallen time and again for clever tyrants. The enemy of tyranny is an educated population, by which I do not mean a population that possesses meaningless degrees in non-subjects, but a genuinely questioning population whose knowledge is broad and deep. Everything else stems from this.

It was for this reason that the internet seemed like a breath of fresh air in the 1990s. Some people had high hopes that it would end tyranny, because knowledge was finally free. Project Gutenberg's copy of Fair Italy is a side-effect of this.

But I have always been skeptical of internet utopianism. No doubt there were similar hopes for television, but television did not bring about the revolution. I suspect that if you were to dump hundreds of babies into the world's greatest library they would not necessarily grow up to become genii. Instead they would probably hit each other with the books and, as they grew older, they would hoard them in order to be the person with the most books.

Jocular Foil Hog

Rage hard / into the light

in the words of Holly Johnson

In the last post I had a look at the Holga, a toy camera from the 1980s that became very popular with hipsters in the 1990s and remains so today. If the 1980s was a decade of perfectionism and gloss, the 1990s was a decade of scuzz and Super 8 and slackers and slack, and the Holga fit right in. It captured a society that had grown disillusioned with the notion of progress; it captured a new generation that stripped away the old rules, looking for new answers in one another's arms. What followed was a decade in which they won, and we lost. There was a test, which we failed.

The plastic lens and limited exposure controls lend themselves to black and white film, which is very tolerant of incorrect exposure, but there's nothing to stop you using colour film as well. Only your tiny limited mind and bedridden fingers and the ever-present fear of vampirism.

For all the shots in this post I used Fuji 160, which is roughly correct for overcast conditions, perhaps slightly underexposed. 400-speed film is more popular, especially e.g. Fuji 400H, because it easily tolerates overexposure (and actually becomes more saturated the more you pump it). Outside of England there is sunshine.

Colour actually makes the Holga's lens look even worse, because it shows up the truly astounding chromatic aberration. In black and white the Holga's dreamy look resembles something from the Victorian era, whereas in colour the Holga is revealed as a cheap plastic disposable camera. For this reason cross-processing slide film is very popular, in part because it looks fantastic, but also because it hides the grim reality of colour fringing.

Next, Milan.

Ata Ata Holga Hulu, Ham Tot Zoglo Hulu Hulu

Today we're going to have a look at the Holga, a popular novelty that I (surprisingly) haven't written at length about yet. The Holga is a rare example of pre-internet hipster culture that has survived and thrived in the internet age. In fact, with the rise of Flickr and Instagram and Tumblr and so on, it's even more prevalent than it was, although nowadays the Holga is more an idea - a look, a set of filters - than a physical imaging system. The fiddliness and expense of shooting with film puts people off.

Most of the images in this article were shot with Kodak TMAX 100, developed at home with R09. I bought my first Holga in the late 1990s, but it was a cynical decision. I couldn't afford a digital camera at the time, and it seemed a waste of money buying a 35mm film SLR, because film was on the way out. Nonetheless I needed to keep up with a trendy crowd, and the Holga was the most cost-efficient way of doing so.

It's easy to forget, but the 1990s was a poor decade for film cameras. The Spotmatics and Canonet GIII f1.7s that people generally think of when they think of film photography were long-dead. Even in the 1990s they fetched a surprisingly steep price on the used market. Instead film in the 1990s was all about APS, and disposable cameras, and compact cameras with f/5.6-11 autofocus zoom lenses, and everything was futuristic, in a way that has dated terribly. In the 1990s classic style was old hat. There were a few attempts to recapture the timeless looks of the past, but they were horribly misguided, viz the Nikon 35Ti, which had little dials on the top. My memory of photographic technique in the 1990s is that you were supposed to shoot with slide film, and bracket everything, and if you weren't shooting the same scene five times in a row you weren't a proper photographer. You were supposed to shoot test rolls to make sure that your batch of film was up to snuff. And you had to wash your film before you developed it. It was the age of the Nikon Pronea S and the Minolta 800si, non-entities then and now. Photography had a fin de siècle quality about it that permeated Generation X culture; a sense that everything had been done, that the problem had been solved, but we still weren't happy, and all that was left was decadence and trinkets. As decades go, the 1990s was totally bum slops.

You might not remember Generation X. The kids of the late 1960s and early 1970s grew up and entered the job market at a time of unemployment and recession, after having been promised the Earth. The punks said that there was no future, and gleefully awaited the end; Generation X saw an endless pointless mediocre future in which nothing ever happened. "It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same."

Not all of them died of heroin overdoses or self-inflicted shotgun wounds, but the survivors aren't doing so well. You know, if they had picked up arms and slaughtered everybody over the age of 50 - instead of just moping - they would now be the bastards in charge, but instead they're just as poor and unemployed as they were in the 1990s. You, my children, don't make the same mistake.

In a way the Holga was just another decadent trinket, but that was fine by me because I was a product of my time and loved decadent trinkets just as much as the next man. It's just that the Holga was within my price range. Generally hipsters don't like to talk about money, but it underpins everything they do, and everything they are. You can't be a hipster without having access to a lot of money. Actual poor people - of the old school - can't afford to buy the latest gadgets and fashions, and this was even more problematic in the late 1990s, because the latest gadgets were proportionally much more expensive back then. If I had bought an actual poor person's camera to the table I would have been mocked and shunned, because there was nothing ironic about cheap instant cameras, nothing cute about them.

A Holga, however, was a guaranteed entry ticket to hipsterville, and it didn't cost very much at all. In fact the camera was cheaper than the cost of buying and developing a couple of rolls of 120 film. The interesting look was a bonus.

If I had pressed the button a split-second earlier, the cyclist would have been in the frame. That moment will never come again, and I'll regret it until the day I die. God set up the shot for me, and I blew it.

And it does have an interesting look, although it's a bit of a one-trick pony. It would be easy to dismiss the Holga as a faddish pile of cynical crap if it wasn't for that fact that it pushes the right buttons. I'm reminded of the famous Japanese drawing of a woman being ravished by an octopus. It's so wrong, on so many levels, and yet the fisherman's wife doesn't seem to mind. Of course, she's not real; the only real person getting a sexual kick out of that scene was the man drawing it, who was a man. But the point still stands. It would still stand. If I could remember what it was. Sometimes beautiful flowers grow from infertile earth. Cherish the flower.

Nonetheless a trawl through some Flickr groups reveals slag heaps of monotonous, near-identical Holga images produced by people all around the world. Taken in short bursts they're fascinating, but eventually the effect becomes tiring. The look was a cliché even in the 1990s. The June 1996 issue of Popular Photography mentions it in disparaging terms, and it's interesting to see that the practice of illustrating a camera review with just four really crappy photographs is not a new development:

It seems that rubber bands were fashionable in America. I have always used masking tape. No doubt in Japan they tie their Holgas up with string, like something from the world of Nobuyoshi Araki (or perhaps they use octopuses, I just don't know). Oh why does everything have to degenerate into tentacle porn? It's the chilliness that puts me off, really. I've never thought of octopuses as being particularly smelly creatures, but they're cold to the touch and that's a passion killer.

Popular Photography's writer ignores the Holga look entirely, and assumes that people were drawn to the camera purely because of its worth as an artefact, fancy that. The other popular criticism levelled at the Holga is that it was overpriced for what you got. In the 1990s there were scads of used Kodak Brownies and Agfa box cameras available for even less than a Holga, but in my experience the look isn't comparable. Genuine vintage cameras are, if anything, too good, with fewer light leaks, sharper lenses, and flatter film than a Holga. Indeed I was a bit disappointed by my Agfa Synchro Box for this very reason.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, when people think about the look of vintage photographs they're really thinking about the look of prints, faded and torn by time. The thing that makes vintage photographs vintage isn't the photography, it's time. Time and distance. Our vision of the past is filtered though a distorted lens. The Holga is a kind of photographic time machine, it produces negatives that look like ancient prints.

The early history of the Holga is sketchy. Searching through Google Books, the earliest picture I could find of one is from an advert in the March 1990 edition of American Photo:

From an advert for the Maine Photographic Resource, American Photo, March 1990

It's not the first appearance of a Holga, though - a flash-equipped model is listed in an advert for New York's Cambridge Camera Exchange in the February 1989 Popular Photography. For $39.95, which seems high.

I fucking love The Simpsons.

Who made the original Holga? Wikipedia cites a source that identifies a "T M Lee" and dates the original design to 1981, but this sounds like bullshit. The rest of the internet simply repeats these two facts like a big electronic parrot. And yet after Googling for a while it seems that Wikipedia is broadly correct. "T M Lee" is actually Lee Ting-mo, who designed the Holga for Universal Electronics Industries of Kowloon, Hong Kong. The Chinese market for cheap medium format toy cameras had been displaced by posher 35mm models but luckily for Universal Electronics Industries the Holga became a favourite of artsy photographers in Europe and America. The company's bacon was saved by plastic.

Who runs Britain? Hint: it's not you.

Plastic bacon. UEI now shifts 200,000 Holgas a year, which isn't bad at all. Is the Holga you can buy on eBay an official Holga, or a clone? Mine doesn't have any manufactuer's marks, either on the camera or anywhere on the packaging, so for all I know Mr Lee is totally penniless and bitter, and curses the morning.

I have owned two Holgas. My first was a 120S, which I bought in 2000-ish. It had a single shutter speed, a switchable aperture, and a hot shoe. It came with a plastic mask that slotted into the body that masked the frame to 645 (vertical), but in those days it was almost de rigueur to remove the mask and shoot without it. With the mask in place the images had sharply-defined edges and were cropped to the lens' sweet spot - which almost defeated the point - whereas with the mask out the edges were fuzzy and undefined and blurry and messy:

The mask also helped to keep the film flat. There were several popular modifications at the time, and a couple of them have been officially folded into the Holga's design. Thus my modern Holga has a tripod thread, a choice of 1/100th or bulb exposure and a 6x6 mask, which helps to block out light leaks and keeps the film flat whilst retaining the square format. I generally shoot with the mask in place. Scanning software generally works best if it can see the edge of the frame.

One other thing. My first Holga came in a generic blue cardboard box, whereas new Holgas have hipster graphics on the packaging. Which feels wrong, in a way; part of the Holga's appeal comes from the sense that we are subverting something unselfconsciously pure, whereas the hipster packaging gives the game away. Does that make sense? It's like finding out that your favourite singer didn't learn to sing by serenading doves in a misty field, she instead went to stage school.

As you can see, it focuses, although the depth of field at f/13 is such that it's very basic. Despite being made of plastic the lens is surprisingly sharp in the middle. It becomes blurry towards the edges, and this - combined with the vignetting, the chaotic lens flare, the creased film, random streaks of light etc - is what gives the Holga its charm. In the right hands the central sharpness and strong vignetting are powerful compositional tools, naturally drawing the eye to the middle of the frame. Some Holgas have a glass lens, although this seems to be of no real benefit. The optical viewfinder is designed for the 645 mask, and if you use the 6x6 mask - everybody does - the coverage is very conservative.

There's a line of flags opposite the Houses of Parliament. Each one represents part of the British Empire. The flags are supposed to be impressive, but you look closer and see that Tristan da Cunha has a flag to itself. No offence to the people of Tristan da Cunha, but a whole flag?

My first Holga had a broken aperture mechanism. The switch moved a little arm into place behind the lens; the arm was supposed to have a little aperture, but the factory hadn't installed it. For years this was the way Holgas were made. Modern Holgas now include an aperture, which means that there is (at last!) a way of controlling exposure beyond using different film speeds. The lens is f/8, permanently masked off to f/13, with the aperture arm stopping it down further to about f/20.

In practice this still doesn't give you much control, and ultimately I just don't bother with a lightmeter. Print film has a lot of latitude. All of the London shots in this article were taken with 100-speed film on a mostly overcast day, and they were underexposed a little bit, but Photoshop can work wonders. 400-speed colour film is more than sufficient for the daytime outdoors; if you're indoors, give up. The Holga has a flash hotshoe, but the narrow aperture will defy auto-thyristor flash units, and it seems wrong somehow to calculate flash exposure with a Holga. As if you were taking it too seriously. The lens has a focal length of 60mm, which is roughly 28mm-ish in 35mm terms, slightly narrower.

The camera is cheap, but it uses film, which can be problematic. By the late 1990s medium format film had become firmly established as the professional's film of choice, and I remember that development was not straightforward. The typical local camera shop had to post it off to their central laboratory. The alternative was to use a professional lab - Joe's Basement in my case - but that was expensive, and a lot of them were very snobbish about taking film from ordinary people off the street. They are mostly gone now (including sadly Joe's Basement, who weren't snobbish at all). Posting stuff off was tricky because there was a dearth of good postal photo developers in the UK at the time. Fortunately the field has expanded; out of habit I use Peak Imaging but there are others that I would be happy to advertise (hint). The imperfect quality of Holga images is appealing if you plan to develop the film yourself, because there's no pressure to get things right.

In Holga-land there is no right. Everything is wrong. And it feels good.