Posted for Austin Schermerhorn

Pentacon Six (A Reading)

I have a medium format film camera called a “Pentacon Six” that has been at my side now for almost six years. Wikipedia says it is a camera made between 1956 and 1992 in Dresden, East Germany. A small nameplate at the bottom of the camera corroborates this: “Made in GDR” it says, of course referring to the German Democratic Republic. The camera is beautiful, if cautious about seeming decadent with its vinyl leather skin and slightly tarnished leather case with a dirty red felt interior. The rest of the camera is chrome, and currently I have a waist-level viewfinder on it that I crudely re-skinned with more luxurious leather. A tiny engraving on the viewfinder looks like some sort of small Orthodox church, and my other viewfinder, one you hold up to your eye, looks conspicuously like a the Russian onion of churches such as St. Peters in Moscow. The engraving of “Pentacon Six” is stylized “PENTACON six”, in a characteristic German grotesque, or sans-serif font. It is a quite utilitarian camera, not only used by myself fairly often for six years, but also by its previous owner who had it for an unknown amount of time. The grime between levers as well as the slight rusting of the metal serves as a testament to its staying power. Though fairly large, I have gotten used to bringing it along with me, and when out photographing it seems to bring some sort of interest or curiosity to those who see me using it. Through all these outward signifiers of age, history, politics, design, functionality, the camera performs as it did the day it was made. I find it interesting that the country that made the camera no longer exists, the person (or persons) who used it before me will forever be unknown, and their images made with the camera always unseen by me, but yet some small sign of use, of wear, of history can be seen on this camera.