Ooh, that is painful.

A few years ago, I purchased a used Snugli baby carrier on Ebay intending to modify it into a custom harness for my c330. The Snugli is designed to distribute the weight of a baby in such a way as to make carrying a heavy load more comfortable. As with many projects, it took me a few years to get around to completing this one, but I finally have done so. The openings for a baby’s legs give my hands access to the camera’s focusing knobs and shutter release buttons. Here is a picture of the camera in the harness.

Ah, that feels comfortable.

I was curious if anyone else had considered doing such a thing, so I undertook a Google search and discovered that a guy named Dave Harris has fashioned a homemade steady cam with a Snugli as one of its components.

You may read Dave Harris’s article by clicking Here

Some people think the camera Snugli looks silly, but I am old enough not to care that people think I look silly, if I ever did. What matters to me is that I can now use a long neglected camera because I can carry it without hurting myself.

I use these old photographic machines because I like the aesthetic of doing so, and I enjoy the process of developing film. I converted an inexpensive Snugli into a camera harness because I am a frugal photographer.

This picture reminds me of my own photograph which I call On the Dressing Table.

My favorite seller of FSU cameras is the ebay seller, Synoptics Camera Store. This vendor services these old cameras before selling them so they perform as if they are brand new. And often they will sell items that look new too. The cameras are dirt cheap too — they cost about five percent or less of what one would pay for a comparable Leica, and the ones I have purchased are fine photographic machines.

I have been lamenting that the cameras with fixed lens do not fit as easily into my cargo pants pockets as I would like, so I decided to purchase a collapsible lens — that is a lens that pushes into the camera body when not in use.

The lens I picked up from the Synoptics Camera Store last week is pictured above. Now I will just have to wait a few weeks for it to be shipped to me from Kharkov, Ukraine.

I highly recommend the Synoptics Camera Store.

According the Rozanova, the artist must be more than a passive imitator of nature. Rather, the artist must be “an active spokesman of his relationship with [nature].”

How can one do this? According to Rozanova, “a servile repetition of nature’s models can never express all [of nature's] fullness.” And so, in 1913, Rozanova declared that “it is time, at long last, to acknowledge this and to declare frankly, once and for all, that other ways, other methods of expressing the World are needed.”

Rozanova faults photographers, who, like the servile artists, “in depicting nature’s images, will repeat them.” She contrasts such plagiarists with one of “artistic individuality”, who, in depicting nature’s images, “will reflect himself.”

Might the same criticism be leveled against the popular photographic art of today? Today’s photographic artist must be careful not to fall into the trap of the “artist of the Past,” decried by Rozanova, who, “riveted to nature, forgot about the picture as an important phenomenon, [and] as a result, [the picture] became a pale reminder of what he saw, a boring assemblage of ready-made, indivisible images of nature, the fruit of logic with its immutable, nonaesthetic characteristics.” In a word, “Nature enslaved the artist.”

For Rozanova, the then burgeoning modern art was no longer “a copy of concrete objects; it has set itself on a different plane, it has upturned completely the conception of Art that existed hitherto.”

Rozanova’s prescription for creating works of art that are not mere plagiarized repetitions of nature is, “not only by not copying nature, but also by subordinating the primitive conception of it to conceptions complicated by all the psychology of modern creative thought: what the artist sees + what he knows + what he remembers, etc. In putting paint onto canvas, he further subjects the result of this consciousness to a constructive processing that, strictly speaking, is the most important thing in Art — and the very conception of the Picture and of its self-sufficient value can arise only on this condition.”

For the photographic artist, this constructive processing must inform the editing process as one reviews the various images captured in camera.

The image set forth above, Pete Plays the Blues, is far from a mere repetition of the image I saw in my viewfinder, and yet, it is the image that was captured on film. Some may have discarded this picture because it does not look like the subject framed in the viewfinder at the time the shutter was released. But to me, this image challenged me by revealing, in the Rozanova’s words, “the properties of the World,” from which I could “erect . . . a New World — the World of the Picture, and by renouncing repetition of the visible” I was able to create a different image that I was “forced to reckon with.”

How will the viewer respond to such a photograph? Rozanova observes that, “[f]or the majority of the public nurtured by pseudo artists on copies of nature, the conception of beauty rests on the terms ‘Familiar’ and ‘Intelligible.’ So when an art created on new principles forces the public to awaken from its stagnant, sleepy attitudes crystallized once and for all, the transition to a different state incites protest and hostility since the public is unprepared for it.”

By that measure, both Pete Plays the Blues, and the photo, On the Dressing Table, which is set forth above, might be said to have gone beyond the mere repetition of nature. In each case, upon first showing these photos to a friend and critic, he responded with protest.  Indeed, it was not until I wrote this essay that that I recognized the significance of this unmanipulated photograph, which like the cubist paintings about which Rozanova wrote, shows my subject from multiple points of view all in the same frame.

Another image in which the resulting picture differs substantially from the subject I saw in my camera’s viewfinder is Boys at Play, reproduced below.

For Rozanova, and dare I say, for the photographic artist who strives to be something more than nature’s plagiarist, it is essential that one create works of art that are “self-sufficient,” that is, images that enjoy absolute “liberation . . . from the alien traits of Literature, Society, and everyday life.”

The photograph above, Maritime Abstraction, and other photographs that I hope are more than mere plagiarisms of nature, are shown in my online photo gallery at www.wmgphoto.com.

Olga Rozanova’s essay is reproduced in the book Art in Theory, 1900 — 2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood.