Why the instax mini 8 is essential to anyone who wants to be serious about photography.
My practice as a fine artist deals partly with the philosophy involved with the creative process. I am interested in the decision making process involved when we get inspired and make. There is poetry in our editing of the world through the translation of our thoughts into the action and delivery of our expression.
The instax mini is a powerful machine that we consider to be a substandard toy camera, designed and sold as a novelty product. I actually believe that this camera holds a key to the training of a photographer or artists eye.
In this age of digital technology the importance and value placed on Bresson’s decisive moment has been diluted to almost nonexistence, we can shoot and shoot and shoot, until we get what ever we want. Value has been diminished, images are abundant and crisp and perfect.
When we work photochemicaly, we think differently. When we load a camera with something as valuable and expensive as film we make a commitment to make each shot count. The larger format we use, the more expensive that becomes.
There is no greater training for the eye, for our perception of our surroundings, or our sense of our own personal editing of the world than to load an instax mini with £10 worth of film, that’s ten photographs and to produce ten images that we are happy with. Hopefully these images say something about us, say something about our subject, and above all, where my interest lays, something about photography, photochemistry and the poetry of the creative process.
The Instax camera possesses an aesthetic all its own, with it's limited control and fixed focus lens. The film itself plays a huge part in it’s ‘look’. It has contrast, the colours are rich, but there also the latitude range that we expect from film.
I became interested in the notion that this was the last form of photochemistry readily available on the high street. I started experimenting with loading this film into other cameras, in effect using the Instax as a portable processing unit. The film is exposed in the second camera , loaded back into the Instax for processing. A strange dialogue ensued between these two disparate machines from different eras, a symbiosis both cameras working together to create images impossible from each cameras independence.
A conversation between Carl Rowe's Dad's 1947 Brownie Target six-20 and my Instax mini 8 (pink with a sticker of a dinosaur on the back ) 2014
