My Father, a Rolleiflex and a Very Large Camera

My Father, a Rolleiflex and a Very Large Camera

Some objects in The Cabinet were bought because they were strange. Others because I thought they might contain a story.

These two are different. They were part of my world before I really understood that photography would become such an important part of my life.

My father was not a photographer. He was an accountant.

For a period of his working life he was employed by Lamperti & Garbagnati, a Milanese company that manufactured photographic equipment. There is no romantic story of him designing cameras or working in a darkroom. He worked with numbers, accounts and ledgers. Photography was simply the business happening around him.

I still have one of the company's wooden Viaggio cameras, built for a very different meaning of photographic travel. It folded for transportation, but "portable" in those days was a wonderfully generous concept.

It is difficult to look at it today without thinking about how much the physical act of photography has changed.

Beside it sits something much more personal: my father's Rolleiflex.

The Rolleiflex was his camera.

That distinction matters to me. I don't want to invent a convenient story in which my father worked for a camera manufacturer, became a passionate photographer and naturally passed photography down to his son. Life rarely arranges itself quite so neatly.

He was an accountant who happened to work for a photographic company, and he happened to own a very good camera.

Much later, his son became a photographer.

Perhaps there is no more significance to it than that.

But objects have an irritating habit of acquiring significance when we keep them long enough.

Today I can put the two cameras beside each other and see something I could never have seen when I was young. One represents my father's working life, however indirectly. The other represents something he chose for himself. And both belong to a world of photography that existed around me before photography became my profession.

The Rolleiflex interests me particularly because it is no longer simply an old camera.

There are thousands of Rolleiflexes in collections and camera shops. Collectors can discuss models, lenses, serial numbers, shutters and market values endlessly. All of that can be researched.

But only one of them was my father's.

That changes its value completely.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons for creating The Cabinet in the first place. The value of an object is not necessarily what somebody would pay for it. Sometimes its value lies in the improbable chain of circumstances that allowed it to survive and eventually land on a shelf in your house.

I have spent much of my professional life surrounded by cameras. Cameras have been tools, companions and occasionally sources of considerable frustration. I have bought them, sold them, broken them, replaced them and argued about them.

These two are different.

I don't use them.

I don't particularly need them.

And I certainly wouldn't sell them.

They are simply part of the story.

And I rather like the thought that, long before I knew where photography would take me, there was already a Rolleiflex in the family and an enormous wooden camera waiting somewhere in the background.

THE OBJECT

Rolleiflex 3.5A Automat MX
Serial number: 1274990
Date: 1951–1954
Origin: Braunschweig, West Germany
Maker: Franke & Heidecke
Type: Twin-lens reflex camera
Film: 120 roll film, 6 × 6 cm negatives
Shutter: Synchro-Compur
Material: Metal, glass and leather covering
Provenance: Belonged to my father
Current home: The Cabinet

This Rolleiflex belonged to my father and is therefore one of the few objects in The Cabinet whose personal history matters considerably more to me than its collector's value.

The exact model and date should be established from the camera's serial and lens numbers rather than guessed from its appearance. Once we have those, we can make this description precise.

THE OBJECT

Lamperti & Garbagnati “Viaggio” Mod. 5/2

Probable date: c. 1900–1930
Origin: Milan, Italy
Maker: Lamperti & Garbagnati
Model: Viaggio Mod. 5/2
Type: Folding field / travel plate camera
Material: Mahogany or similar hardwood, brass, glass, leather bellows
Provenance: Family collection
Family connection: My father worked for Lamperti & Garbagnati as an accountant
Current home: The Cabinet

Lamperti & Garbagnati was a Milanese manufacturer of photographic apparatus active from the late nineteenth century. This substantial wooden camera belongs to the era when professional photography required plates, ground-glass focusing and equipment that was closer to furniture than to the cameras we carry today.

Its precise model, format and date remain to be established. I would rather leave those details open than give the camera a false precision based only on its appearance.

STATUS: COLLECTION
This object is currently not for sale.