Photo Sophia Ignatidou
A brand new Lomography shop for photography fetishists has opened in Shoreditch.
The second London branch of the camera brand, which opened last night, is located just a stone’s throw from Spitalfields Market.
The Lomography brand has captured the imagination of amateur and professional photographers across the globe.
Company director Adam Scott revealed it was a plan long overdue. He said: “East London was in my head a lot. After Soho I wanted to open a second shop that could fit a processing lab.”
The Lomography Gallery Store East London will have its own lab installed in mid-January with workshops and walks around the area already lined-up.
Contemporary “Lomo” cameras are a revamped version of the LOMO LC-A camera originally introduced in the 1980s. The current brand’s popularity is attributed to its colourful, light, analog cameras that produce shots with user-specified effects and delightfully unpredictable characteristics
The pictures produced are novel and impossible to replicate as with a fish-eye camera the image is distorted and the user cannot have absolute control over its contrast, colours, and other variables.
“It’s a different state of mind. You don’t think so much when you take pictures, you never really know what’s going to happen”, said Veneta Nedeltcheva, 25, a marketing student from Bulgaria who started using Lomography cameras three years ago. She has been taking photos with her “Diana” camera ever since. “I have a digital camera but it’s kind of dusty right now.”
“You never know what are you going to get.” concurred Richard Legg, a 28-year-old artist who uses the Lomography’s results as a reference for his paintings. “The excitement of the unexpected is what [conventional] digital camera lacks.”
Rafaela Rocha, a 27-year-old art student praised the company’s marketing merits. “They did good marketing. They made their cameras cute and colourful. It’s not so much about the quality of the camera. It can be perceived more as a fetish or a toy thing.”
Lomography Gallery Store East London:117 Commercial St., London E1 6BG, tel:020 74260999, Opening hours- Mon –Sun: 10am-7pm
