A Look Back: Cameras as Art

/ Richard R. Barron

When I was a young teenager, I was influenced by a lot of magazines. I bought and eventually subscribed to Flying, Stereo Review, Popular Photography, Modern Photography, and Omni, and often picked up Scientific American and National Geographic from news stands.

My parents knew that subscriptions to these magazines would make great birthday and Christmas gifts for me, and I would read them cover to cover.

A pair of Contax 139 Quartz SLR cameras sit in my home studio recently.
A pair of Contax 139 Quartz SLR cameras sit in my home studio recently.

It was a golden age of magazines. There was something for everyone. Magazines were slick, bright, full-color products that featured incredible photography. When I read photography magazines, I was impressed by the images made with the cameras they featured, but often I was even more taken by pictures of the cameras themselves.

It is also worth mentioning that Popular Photography and Modern Photography had pages and pages near the back of the magazine that listed camera warehouses like B&H Photo, Cambridge Camera Exchange, 47th Street Photo, and many more, with hundreds of lenses and cameras listed in teeny tiny type. I bought a few cameras from them back in the day, and they often turned out to be grey market, returns, or, in the case of some accessories, absolute no-brand-name junk.

I thought of all this recently when Tre Landrum tagged me, asking if I had any interest in some old cameras he found during a storage clean-out. I am always up for a piece of history, especially cameras and lenses.

Contax put the shutter speed dial on the left side of the top of their cameras. There is no real technical advantage to doing this, so the choice is entirely based on appealing to what photographers might prefer.
Contax put the shutter speed dial on the left side of the top of their cameras. There is no real technical advantage to doing this, so the choice is entirely based on appealing to what photographers might prefer.

Most of the old photographic equipment I come across no longer works, or, just as frequently, doesn’t really have a place in our digital lives.

Among the pearls Landrum found for me in the dusty realm of storage was a pair of Contax 139 Quartz single lens reflex (SLR) cameras from the 1970s. I never owned a Contax camera when I was young, but I always thought highly of them, not because of the pictures they could make (thought they were very capable), but because of how they looked. I thought they were some of the handsomest cameras on the market.

I cleaned up the cameras and photographed them, then put batteries in them to see if they would work, which they did not. While Contax SLR cameras were quite robust in their day, forty years in an attic or garage can cause their delicate electronics to fail.

So in many ways, cameras like the 139 Quartz have become art themselves. I love having them and preserving them. Contax cameras used Carl Zeiss T* lenses, some of the finest optics of the period, and I might consider getting an adaptor so I can use them on one of my mirrorless digital cameras.

Contax, by the way, is infamously known for attempting to market one of the first digital SLR cameras, the Contax N Digital, and failing.

The Contax brand still exists, owned by a German firm, but no Contax cameras are currently being manufactured, and is considered dormant.

I thought the elegantly squared-off lines and sharply readable labels of the Contax 139 Quartz made them some of the best-looking cameras of the 1970s.
I thought the elegantly squared-off lines and sharply readable labels of the Contax 139 Quartz made them some of the best-looking cameras of the 1970s.