VAGEESWARI VIJAY | 1945-1980 It was known as one of the best field and studio cameras the world over, and was manufactured in Alappuzha, Kerala, by K Karunakaran (KK). In 1942, a studio in Alappuzha approached KK’s father Bhagavathar, a musician who also earned his living by designing and repairing musical instruments, to repair the bellows of a foreign-made field camera. Impressed with
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2/5
THE BROWNIE TARGET Six-20 | 1946-1952 It is difficult to overstate the historic importance of the first small, hand-held, simple-to-use, inexpensive box camera. Brownie touted its simplicity of use by declaring that it could be “operated by any school boy or girl”. Until then, getting a picture taken had usually been a formal, posed affair, done by a professional photographer in a stud
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3/5
GRAFLEX Speed Graphic | 1948-1958 “Get a Speed Graphic….with a camera like that, the cops will assume that you belong on the scene and will let you get behind police lines,” said the celebrated press photographer Weegee who prowled the seedy underbelly of Manhattan’s Lower East Side at night with a Graflex and a flashbulb during the 1930s and ’40s. Truly serious photojournalists used th
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4/5
FED 3 Type A | 1961-1963The compact German rangefinder camera Leica had made its way to the Soviet Union by 1927 and had begun to change the habits of Soviet photographers before its import was halted. Feeling a need for the new camera, but not wanting to import it, the Russians took the only other alternative—they would make their own ‘Soviet Leica’. By the early 1930s, hundreds of Russi
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5/5
MINOX B | 1958-1972Manufactured by Minox in Germany, this 9.5 mm film camera was the first subminiature camera with a built-in light meter that did not require batteries. For many years it was the world’s most famous and widely used camera for espionage photography right until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. The close-focusing lens and small size of the camera made it perfect
