The tale of Lori and why I will always be poor, hungry

For the past three weeks or so I’ve been shoot­ing with the Ricoh point and shoot I bought at a thrift store in New Jer­sey. I picked it up because I liked the look of it and it had a sticker on the side that said “Lori,” af-5.jpgwhich is almost iden­ti­cal to some stick­ers I had when I was a lit­tle kid that said “Greg,” for me to stick on toys and stuff. Lori was great while she lasted. I’ve only devel­oped a cou­ple of the rolls but she cranked out some images that have become fast favorites of mine. There images have a qual­ity to them that the same kind of snap­shots I shoot with my Nikon F100 lack. The shitty optics and the com­plete lack of expo­sure con­trol infuse the images with an enhanced sense of spon­tane­ity. There are plenty more of these to come I would guess — I have about 25 rolls I shot thru Lori in a shoe box under my desk wait­ing for pay day. But this is not a happy story. This is a story loss, a story of heartbreak.

Like all of the deep­est and most pas­sion­ate loves, my wild affair with Lori has come to a cat­a­clysmic end. On Sat­ur­day, a group of my friends and I went swim­ming in a river out in Vir­ginia some­where. It was an amaz­ing time, the kind of time leg­ends are made of, and Lori was on hand to cap­ture it for me. I took her in the water with me quite a bit, tak­ing extra care to keep her from get­ting too wet but I’m sure you can see where this is going. For hours we were in and out of the water and Lori was doing just fine, dry, happy, fir­ing away. Then, lit­er­ally when I was get­ting out to get ready to leave, I set Lori down into a crevice in a rock. I needed both hands to pull myself out and I wanted to put her some­where sturdy. That crevice, of course, com­pletely full of water, she got pretty much sub­merged. I took her bat­ter­ies out. I opened her up with a screw­driver, method­i­cally dry­ing out her innards with my room­mates hair dryer. But it was all no use. Lori is gone.

Pho­tog­ra­phy is an expen­sive under­tak­ing for every­one, but I think it’s par­tic­u­larly expen­sive for me just because of how I do things. I think I have to get used to the idea that I will be pay­ing for cam­era repair fre­quently, end­lessly. Lori cost me $25, and now I’m going to spend $75 fix­ing her for the sec­ond time because she had a light leak when I first brought her home. This is pat­tern that I’m sure will con­tinue indef­i­nitely into the future and no mat­ter how much money I may make from what­ever, I have to resign myself to a life of poverty because I have to fix or replace every­thing all the time.

Really think­ing about this though, I sup­pose it’s alright. If I can feed myself AND buy film AND repair all the shit I break all the time, I sup­pose that’s some kind of quan­tifi­able suc­cess. And what good is a cam­era if you can’t take it the water anyway?

Update: Nev­er­mind. Lori works just fine.

Posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 2:10 pm

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