Cranbrook Holga

The new school year starts today. I'm already swamped with work, and it's not going to get any better for the next few days. I might miss a day or two posting here while I catch up.

As long as I'm thinking about school, here's the first of a few photos taken while I was in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art. It was my first time shooting with a Holga camera. A fellow student from the photo department leant me his camera, and I loaded it up with T-Max B&W film and shot the entire roll while walking around the grounds of the Cranbrook educational community on a sunny but cold March day.

At the time, I didn't think much of the Holga. I shot a couple of rolls with the borrowed camera, but wasn't very impressed with the results. I shoved the negatives into a folder and didn't pay much attention to them until I came across them recently while looking for something else. After ten years (these were shot in March, 1998), I guess I have a different perspective. Some of them actually seem decent to me. My favorites from that first roll shot with a Holga will be posted this week.

This photo, by the way, was taken at Cranbrook High School (we called it the boy's school), one of two boarding schools on the campus. The art academy shared a dining hall with the boy's school, and we all enjoyed the oddly homoerotic 1930's era murals depicting boys engaging in sports and other aspects of boarding school life that adorned the walls there.