By Ashleigh Fielding | posted on July 27, 2017
NOTHING says a snapshot of history like a collection of old photographs.
The ACE Camera Club’s upcoming exhibition Rewind: Traditional Photography Revisited at the Vancouver Arts Centre will explore an era of traditional film and chemistry used to create memories, in a time before digital media existed.
The exhibit opens on Monday, July 31, and will display photographs taken with 1950s, 1960s and homemade cameras, of places, objects and people around the contemporary Great Southern.
“Some of the homemade cameras are made with drainpipes and even a potato!” ACE Camera Club’s Bob Symons said.
“The drainpipe camera I made was using a 150mm drainpipe, and it creates a pinhole camera effect.
“These types of cameras create photos with some weird things, quite unpredictable. You can’t get those sorts of effects with Photoshop.”
The Rewind: Traditional Photography Revisited exhibition will display the works of the ACE Camera Club’s six members, including a short story about how each of the photos was produced.
“I had the chance to use a 1926 studio camera, the one you have to put a cover over your head to use, and a 100-year-old lens that takes 20 minutes to capture just one photo,” Mr Symons said.
The ACE Camera Club now has a permanent studio on the top floor of the Vancouver Arts Centre and is open to people seven days a week.
“Our main aim is to get everyone to do to their own thing,” Mr Symons said.
“We leave the studio set up and people can come in and use it for an hour or two, or however long they need, and we have a photo printer here too.”
“When we first started, we focused mainly on film, but now we have expanded to include video and anything to do with light, really.”
The Rewind: Traditional Photography Revisited exhibition will close on September 16.
