‘Lomography’ Clicks With Shutterbugs

Past piles of rusted junk, up a few dark flights in a nearly deserted factory, workers in white jackets sit assembling cheap little Soviet cameras that until recently almost nobody wanted.

Now they can’t make them fast enough. The camera made by the Leningrad Optical-Mechanical Organization, known as LOMO, is at the core of a new international craze called “lomography.”

Lomographers, as they call themselves, shoot pictures spontaneously from odd angles, holding the palm-size Lomo at their ankles, out to the side, over their head--and rarely looking through the viewfinder.

The idea is to take lots of pictures in a city, develop the film at the corner drugstore and create giant collages from the prints. The mood of a metropolis emerges from the collage’s bright patterns.

Using the Lomo camera adds to the fun. It’s cheap--about $20--and funky-looking, a Soviet-era relic with “USSR” printed across the front.

“We use this camera because we love it--it has a special history,” Elisabeth Breitkopf of Berlin said during a tour of St. Petersburg with fellow lomographers. “This camera gives us the inspiration to do all these things.”

Demand for the camera has saved the jobs of workers in what was once part of the mighty Soviet defense industry, enlisting them in the service of the avant-garde.

The resurrected assembly shop was invaded one afternoon by Breitkopf and 100 other artsy Austrians and Germans who came to St. Petersburg to show the workers what they had become a part of.

The lomographers praise the Lomo’s good 32mm lens and a shutter that will slow down to take pictures in low light without a flash.

“Normal cameras are very modern; they have a flash,” Breitkopf said. “We like it that you have to do a lot manually.”

The lomographers made peculiar tourists in St. Petersburg. Sure, they toured the Hermitage and admired its Impressionist art. But they also waded into a column of Russian army recruits and groups of schoolchildren visiting the museum, smiling and clicking away wildly with their Lomos.

Lomographers say not having the camera plastered to their face allows for a more personal approach.

“A lot of Russians on the street look angry,” said Wolfgang Stranzinger, president of the international Lomographic Society, based in Vienna. “But when I use a Lomo, 99% smile back. So I get in touch with them.”

The movement got its start when Matthias Fiegl bought a Lomo Compact Automatic in a Czech camera store in the early 1990s and took it back to the house in Vienna that he shared with Stranzinger and others, all university students at the time.

They played around with the funny old-fashioned camera, and before long they were combing photo shops in the former Soviet bloc to find Lomos.

The movement took off. The society now has about 14,000 members, most in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, but with new branches opening in Canada, France, Japan, South Africa and the United States.

The privatized LOMO, which once cranked out night-vision goggles and gun sights for the Soviet military, is shifting its optical know-how to microscopes, medical equipment and other big-ticket exportable items. But it has signed a two-year contract to supply cameras to the Lomographic Society.

The company now makes 1,000 a month and plans to boost production to 7,500 a month by January, spokesman Lazar Zalmanov said. The work force will grow from 45 to 350.

“If we hadn’t gotten the contract with the Austrians, we would have been out of a job,” said Lida Rozhnevskaya, who has worked at LOMO for 14 years.