À propos
STREET BOX CAMERA
In june 2022, from wood, glass and metal,
I built an "Afghan" Street Box Camera,
behind a 1920's 9x12cm large format camera.
This simple but such ingenious woodbox, make it possible to combine
a camera obscura and a portable B&W mini-lab "all-in-one",
to deliver nice minute made unique pictures, that can be given
to the models immediately,
thanks to a 10x15cm paper negative classical analog technic.
This ancester of our modern "photomaton", was invented in the end of the 19th century, by lower class photographs craftsmen, who couldn't afford a real in-door photo-studio, and pushed to imagine this amazing solution of a shooting camera with its portable darkroom, to be able to directly sale their portraits in the street to middle class people, happy to get family souvenir & cheaper portraits for official administrative documents rather than in a real studio.
This old job of "street portrait maker"
(just like the shoe shiner or knife sharpener)
disapeared in Western Europe and in Norther America
with the arrival of affordable little glass plate or film cameras that rich clients could get for their own practice of family photographs.
Therefore, in the rest of the world, like in Africa, South America or Asia, up to nowdays, we can find Street Box Camera Photographers, who still continue to make souvenirs for people and official documents portraiture for the population.
Notably in Afghanistan -a country retarded by so many decenies of wars- such street photographers are known to be very common, and that's the reason why the US GI's called it "Afghan Box", as it became popular again to western artists.