Photos taken with shaded light, contrast color, Polaroid-effects. We are talking about images taken with an analogue LOMO camera and a new cult of photography aesthetics: LOMOGRAPHY.
LOMO, the acronym for Leningradskoe Optiko-Mechaničeskoe Ob”edineni, spread throughout the former Soviet republics, at the beginning of the 1980s, and in just a few years, it then became “the Soviet Everyman Camera”, the camera that every Russian citizen took with him. From there, it then spread throughout all Eastern countries, which however, remained the camera’s only market until the beginning of the 1990s, when Matthias and Wolfgang, two Austrian students, in a vintage camera shop in Prague, bought some Lomo cameras for a small amount of money. The boys, completely fascinated by the photos’ unexpected effects, made Lomomania explode, giving birth to a clandestine import from Eastern countries. This is how Lomography was born, an artistic movement made up of lovers of analog photography, united by their passion for “artistic” photography, whose photos are one-of-the-kind in their genre. The movement, at first snubbed by professional artists and photographers, in 1992, created the Creative Manifesto of Lomography, which defined the “pop revolution in the field of photography”.
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Indeed, the uniqueness of the photos is in thanks to an objective that is particularly sensitive, with an f/2.8 aperture, along with the small size of the lens, creates images that are highly saturated with color and with overexposure vignetting. The result is a glossy, “live”, lifted image, shaded with different colors, each time more similar to a work of art than to a real photo. Its spread around the world, testimony to the success of the Lomo camera, has resulted in the creation of Lomo Walls, iconic walls on which lomography images can be admired: in Trafalgar Square in London, at the MoMa museum in New York, in Beijing and in many other cities. Over the years, LOMO has created various models of 35-mm cameras, one of the most famous being the Diana Instant Black +, a politically correct camera, able to transform anyone into a do-it-yourself artist. Recapturing Polaroid technology, it offers the possibility of being able to develop and immediately see photos as soon as they are taken. Every click is unrepeatable, the photographic effect is different for every picture.
To celebrate YOOX’s 9th anniversary, Lomo has produced a limited-edition version of its Diana Instant Black + with a matching, customisable YOOX Shopping Bag to take it everywhere with you.
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