This is a Lomography LC-A+ camera, but this story is mostly about the LC-A, the camera that the LC-A+ updated.⁠

⁠If you are a fan of rabbit holes, as so many of us internet-goers are, read through the history of the LC-A.  You cannot get it's story all in one place, for it meanders, and different tellers paint the picture with different brushes.  You could start with Soviet General Igor  Petrowitsch Kornitzky (a name that virtually doesn't exist outside the Lomosphere histories) plunking a Japanese Cosina CX-2 onto the desk of Mikhail Panfilov, who himself had brought several Soviet industries together to form LOMO (translates to Leningrad Optical Mechanical Association), and encouraging his Soviet engineers to produce a replica that would become the LC-A.⁠

⁠From there, you could rewind time to 1914, immerse yourself in the history of a company founded in Petrograd and making gun sights for the Russian war effort (this was eight years before the treaty that would create the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution).  They'd resume camera production after the war, making such curiosities as the FOTOKOR and VOOMP - they loved their acronyms, don't we all.⁠

⁠Or you could also leap forward in time, to two Austrian students, Matthias Fiegl and Wolfgang Stranzinger, in a Czechoslovakian flea market in May of 1991 (less than two years before that country would be dissolved into the Czech and Slovak Republics).  They'd discover an LC-A and with it, would launch an analog movement, or cult or religion - however you wish to call it.⁠

⁠This is just a brief winding path through the story around this camera.  As we said, there's a rabbit hole here.  Be careful not to trip and fall in... or, brace yourself and jump with both feet.⁠

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During a recent visit to our shop, one of our customers, Abel Blackwell, offered to loan us his pair of LC-A cameras.  Abel has both an original LOMO LC-A and the later "copy of a copy of a copy" LC-A+.⁠

The LC-As are fun, little cameras.  The name is short for Lomo Kompakt Automat. Inspired by the Cosina CX-2, the first LC-A cameras went into production in St. Petersburg in 1984, intended solely for the Soviet market.  As more of these cameras were made and started to filter around Europe, they eventually acquired a cult following.  LC-As ceased production in 1994 but a group of Vienna-based photography enthusiasts convinced LOMO (with the help of Vladimir Putin no less, who was vice mayor of St. Petersburg at the time) to start the LC-A back up. ⁠

Production carried on until 2005 when the camera was, again, discontinued.  The following year, the Lomographic Society (not to be confused with the original Soviet LOMO factory) introduced the LC-A+, a successor that retained the look and feel of the original, but added a few new features to the LC-A.  ⁠The LC-A+ cameras were mostly made in China but, for a while, LOMO PLC continued to produce a small number of cameras for Lomography, which are now known as the LC-A+ RL. ⁠

Despite loving and using these cameras often himself, Abel left them in our care for a couple of weeks, so we could get a roll of film through each.  It had been a while since we had played with an LC-A, original or otherwise, and the experience was quite liberating, as the cameras lend themselves so well to the fast, serendipitous point-and-click style of photography.  Thanks, Abel, for the loaners! 

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