The tale of Lori and why I will always be poor, hungry
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
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,” 
which 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.
July 6th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I was really into that story and I felt for you!
Then the added update made for hilarity.