Camera club: the Hong Kong-made Diana – a lomography icon whose imperfections its fans celebrate
Plastic right down to its lens, and sold for US$1, the Diana was everything a camera shouldn’t be; then lomographers – fans of an equally bad USSR-made shooter – discovered it. Now collectors buy Dianas for US$300
The Diana seemed, like so much redundant technology, destined for the great landfill of history, except for one factor: the unpredictable, glitchy effects the cheap plastic camera produces are sought by aficionados of the art of lomography, or lo-fi photography, which repositions its technological defects as advantages.
Diana images are soft-focus, unpredictably blurry and full of unexpected light effects, with a dreamy, colour-saturated quality. No two images are the same; in fact, no two Dianas will record the same scene in the same way.
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Hong Kong photographer Tony Lim Chi-kin, who has more than 80 Dianas, which he has collected since 2003, says the camera’s appeal lies in “the unexpected distortion of images. It’s like I’m shooting reality, but it is not the same as what I see and understand. It means that seeing is not believing.”
The Diana, production of which began more than 60 years ago in a factory in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong, was a toy that didn’t work very well and was designed to be more or less disposable.
It was incredibly basic: made entirely from plastic, including the lens, its faults were manifold. The housing didn’t fit properly and usually had to be taped to prevent light leakage – light randomly splashing across the images. The view through the viewfinder didn’t necessarily represent the content of the photo.
