I first got introduced to Lomography (it emphasizes very casual and ’snapshot’ type photo’s) in January this year when I was attending a photography tradeshow, SWPP in London. I attended a lecture where one of my favourite photographers, Jose Villa was giving a talk. Everyone at the lecture put their business card into a box, and Jose drew out two cards, one of which was mine, and excitedly handed each of us a Holga camera, which we got to keep!. The beauty of this bulky, fun plastic Russian camera (which takes medium format film), is that you don’t quite know what result you’re going to get. Light leaks into the camera, giving splashes of vivid colour, sometimes richly over-saturated colour – the excitement lies in the result. Unlike digital photography, each shot has to be wound on, so if you forget, you can get something quite arty and double-exposed. Sometimes, you think you’ve taken a certain shot, and like magic, the result is not quite what you’d expected! Lomography comes with the 10 golden rules – one of them being ‘don’t worry about any rules’! Anyway, Jules mentioned to me that CTSP was running a lomography course in Cape Town, every Tuesday evening for 6 weeks. I signed on with her, and that’s where the addiction began! I’ve been out on two lomo shoots – the first was to Kalk Bay, which has loads of amazing antique shops and knick knacks. For the second lomo shoot, a few us from CTSP went to Khayelitsha township early one Saturday morning, some with Holga’s, others with different types of lomo cameras and had such an incredible time being in the heart of so much African colour and energy. Khayelitsha is like another world – one woman had her car boot opened and it was filled with live chickens, another was selling sheeps heads neatly lined up on a table on the side of a road, another happily doing her laundry….oh and just about every shop proudly displayed the most beautifully colourful, hand-written signs. Exposure Gallery in Woodstock sell all different types of these cameras – Holga’s, LC-A’s, fisheyes…seriously, once you start using one these, you’ll be hooked! The square format shots were taken with my plastic Holga, the 35mm format shots were taken with a friends LC-A lomo. I am so happy to live in Africa – this place ROCKS!!!
