Ghosts of Photography Past

It does not work anymore, but it still looks good. My first SLR camera, unearthed today.

As a journalist, my pre-professor career was mostly as a writer. True, my first gig was as a sports editor at a small daily paper, and I later was overall editor of that same paper—but while I did copy editing, page design and photography, my primarily activity was interviewing people and writing stories based on those interviews.

So if you asked me what I “was” before I began teaching at Mount Mercy University, I would say “a writer” and I meant it, although I was really a reporter/writer.

Still, photography was important to me. In 1979, for a photography class at Muscatine Community College, I purchased a Minolta SLR camera, a model XG-1. It was a lower-end camera, sort of between the amateur and professional worlds, but it served me well and was my primary visual tool for a decade or so.

I learned to roll my own black-and-white film, develop it in a darkroom, create contact prints and print images for media use.

Old film, a photography guide, the camera, lenses and a flash. The cloth for cleaning lenses may still be useful.

A lot has changed in the world of photography, and journalism, in 40 years. All that knowledge of film and paper is way less important in the digital era.

This week, my wife has taken on the project of clearing a mountain of clutter from our garage. I’ve helped out, some, but to be honest, she has done the bulk of the work. She is trying to be as clear as possible—if it’s been accumulating in the garage for 10 years or more, the idea was to toss it out.

But the old Minolta was there. It was slated for the junk yard—it’s been nonfunctioning for decades—but I decided it just looked too cool. I’m going to consider it office decorations.

These days, I teach others to write and make images mostly as a hobby for my own pleasure. I like it, but just as a background in typewriters and early computers helps me today (students often don’t known what a “tab” key is nor how it should be used, a concept us old Remington users have more of a handle on), time spent years ago with the Minolta and its manual controls ingrained ideas such as depth of field that are not obvious to new image makers.

I have many fond memories of using that first SLR camera. Honestly, I don’t miss the darkroom all that much—Photoshop is way much handier—but I learned a lot using that Minolta. Along with the camera was a book I bought back then. I don’t recall if it was the text for that MCC class, but it was a book that opened my eyes to see the world in a new way.

The way a photographer sees it. And even if I never was fully a photographer, making images was something that I could do and enjoyed doing.

Thus, I was happy to see that camera again. And I’ll be happy to us it as a fancy paperweight on my desk. It’s a physical reminder of where I was and where I started.

Camera bag. A bit grimy, but I may clean it and use it again. It's the one piece of ancient equipment that may still work.