Galleries
Lomography Gallery Store
The Lomography Gallery Store is an interesting proposition - a real world venue for a community of photographers who've shared, shopped and communicated with each other online. As the name suggests, the new addition to Queen West is both a shop and a gallery, but the people behind it hope that it'll also become a clubhouse for fans of the distinctly low-tech and proudly analogue cameras it celebrates.
The Lomography story begins in Russia, where central economic planning led to the manufacture of a range of wonky cameras like the Lomo LC-A, whose primitive mechanisms and often plastic lenses were never going to give Nikon a run for their money. The story then moves to Vienna, where fans of the original Lomo camera made a deal with the Russian manufacturers to sell the camera to a growing cult of lo-fi shutterbugs.
Lomography's Austrian HQ decided last year that there was enough of a community of Lomographers in Toronto to merit a storefront presence for the company, which led to a fall opening in what was once the Red Indian Art Deco antique shop. Local Lomo enthusiast James Greenspan got the gig as store manager, and sums up his mission simply: "We're a community, and this is a place for the community to meet."
The gallery aspect is manifest in a river of Lomo snaps, knitted together in a mosaic that flows from wall to ceiling to wall across the front of the space. Greenspan says that new exhibitions will be composed of the results of Lomography "rumbles," where a theme is announced to the community, and the results are collected online and printed out for display, a process integral to Lomography's online backbone. "Lomography was actually a social network before Friendster," Greenspan points out.
The store sells everything from the LC-A+, the update of the classic Lomo, to plastic-lens cameras like the Holga and Diana, to panoramic specialty items like the Sprocket Rocket, the Spinner 360 and the Horizon, to offbeat fun cameras like the Supersampler, the Actionsampler, the Fisheye and the Colorsplash. There are refurbished Russian cameras, as well as accessories, books, bags and t-shirts. Prices range from $30 for a pinhole camera kit to around $500 for a Russian-made Horizon Perfekt. Film can be bought, and Greenspan says that they plan to offer developing in the future.
While you can get cellphone apps that try to ape the look of a Lomo, Diana or pinhole camera, Lomo fans insist that the film patina can't be digitally duplicated, and that no digital camera can match the one-shot, shoot-from-the-hip, accidents-are-everything aesthetic that Lomography encourages. With the arrival of the Toronto Lomography store, this community can finally meet in the flesh and shop in person.
Writing and photos by Rick McGinnis.
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*die and gone to heaven*
no more ordering online! woot!
Unless you are dropping $7k on a state of the art DSLR, good quality 35mm film will give better results than digital.
And digital can't even come close to matching the detail in medium format film.
On a side-note, they couldn't have chosen for the store a better location... Queen W. close to Bellwoods.. How hip of them.
that would be awesome
Lomography is just what this strip of Queen street needs since everything else in the area purveys either boots or booze. Stop being a philistine.
closer to Spadina than Bellwoods.
Lomos are fun cameras and have spawned an aesthetic all of their own, but they aren't designed to compete with DSLR or SLR cameras.
As for the argument regarding digital resolution vs. film, it's old and done. Who cares about how many megapixels you can cram onto a sensor, film's look can't be replicated. Nor can the process of shooting with film.
I can't see the point myself, if you want to shoot digita shoot digital already, but the argument that the look and feel of film can't be replicated is simply not true. Of course, Photoshop is fairly high end for the average user, and I totally agree that your average iPhone app doesn't cut the mustard.
Personally I've moved on from film. I used to be a member, fairly active too, when the Lomo movement first started in Europe, but that was at a time when I had a job where I had access to both free film and free processing.
Thanks
Tel: (647) 352-6700
I also have a Demekin fisheye camera that takes 110 film.
@Jake - try Silvano's on Weston Road for developing film.
I would've loved to see Agfa, though.
West Camera, 5 second east of Lomography, will do it (although I've never tried it, so I can't comment on quality of prints).
they sell cameras that dont work, i went through 3 la sardinas, until finally giving up
Also on my last few visits to the store i overheard staff discussing how they dont get breaks, and were treated unjustly.
Their film is stored on the wall next to heaters, as well as in boxes and they sell these at a higher rate claiming they are 'expired'
They charge more based on design, not function.
They charge expensive rates for processing and send it out,and you have a much longer wait (min. 1 week) to receive your film back from lomography in comparison to the one day developing west camera offers.
their fuji instax film costs 15 for one pack, in comparison to other retailers who price theirs at 15 for two packs. Their fuji camera as well is an unreasonable price, 20-40 dollars more in comparison to other retailers.
I requested to speak to a manager upon my last visit due to my la sardina camera, and they sent out some 20 something kid who was supposed to help me, unfortunately he claimed he had not known about the issue, but upon further research i've found this is a world wide problem amongst this camera.
Needless to say, I will never enter their store again.