The Diana Camera Origins - Revisited

I posted an article awhile ago about what I knew about the beginnings of the Diana camera and it's use as an artists' tool.

http://www.dianacamera.com/blog/2008/9/25/the-diana-camera-origins-where-did-it-all-begin.html

Part of what II wrote was this:

"The story of the Diana camera as an artist’s tool, begins in the 1970s, when the photography department at Ohio University started teaching their students with cheap toy cameras. The earliest documentation I have been able to find on this subject, is a Popular Photography article published in 1971 on the subject. The article was titled: $1 toy teaches photographyby Elizabeth Truxell, the Chairman of the Dept. of Photography at Ohio University in Athens.In the article, Truxell outlines the program where students were able to purchase a Diana camera for use in class for $1.83, film for 15 cents a roll. The intent was to loosen up the students by having them shoot lots of film."

I recently received an email from William Messer who read what I posted and had more information about the Diana camera and it's beginnings. I find this kind of information interesting and wanted to share it. With his kind permission, his letter is posted here:

I have heard this information repeated often and am surprised that it is still done so. Scores of photographers know the story of the Diana camera as an artist's tool begins well before 1970 because they lived it. Those of us who went through the program at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960s know that Photography Department chair Gerry Burchard had the idea of making everyone put away whatever camera they had brought with them to art school and leveling the equipment field by marching us all down to SF's Chinatown to each purchase a little blue/black plastic Diana camera at a price of 69 cents (about 40% the Ohio price years later). We used only this camera for the first semester of our first year, developing the film by hand in trays (tanklessly) to learn that photography is in the mind and eyes rather than in fancy equipment. This was already standard practice by the time I got there in 1968. In fact, I transfered to SFAI because I saw photographs that had been made with Diana cameras in a SFAI catalogue or school publication that I found in my university library in Boston in 1967, and it intrigued me to imagine what sort of school would use toy cameras photographs to illustrate its catalogue (it was the Summer of Love, after all). If I'd seen these student-made Diana photographs in my school library thousands of miles from the West coast no doubt others had encountered them too, perhaps appropriating the idea. I can't say definitively that Burchard at SFAI was first to use Dianas with photo students, but he was doing it well before 1970

-William Messer

The use of the camera as a teaching tool in San Francisco in the 1960s doesn't surprise me, and it makes sense that the camera would be in use for a time before it's use was noted by the Pop Photo article. In this new era of lo-fi photography which seems to be marketing driven, I find this bit of the history of lo-fi photography to be fascinating.

Comments

[David C.]

Thanks for adding this first-person account of the history of toy camera photography!