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 the repairs, the studio owner persuaded KK to make his own field cameras, with teak wood and brass, with the lens imported from Germany. KK set up his shop in 1945, branding it Vageeswari (one of the many names for Saraswati, the goddess of learning), sold his first camera for ₹250, and went on to rule the market for over four decades.Image by THREE LIONS/GETTY IMAGES
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 studio. The Brownie gave rise to the idea of the snapshot. Having written an article in the 1940s for amateur photographers, suggesting that expensive cameras were not necessary for quality photography, Picture Post’s celebrated photographer Bert Hardy supported his argument by using a Brownie to stage a carefully posed snapshot of two young women sitting on railings above a breezy promenade in Blackpool, UK. The Brownie range became the best-selling cameras of all-time, especially the Six-20 with its easily respoolable film.Image by BERT HARDY/PICTURE POST/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
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 the Graflex, despite it being a slow process that took practice. Nothing in the Graphic was automated the operation of manually changing out each film holder, opening the shutter, cocking the focal plane, removing the dark slide, focusing the camera and releasing the focal plane could be very time consuming. If you didn’t pay attention, you could double expose, shoot blanks, fog previous exposures or shoot out of focus images, or miss a shot completely.Image by WEEGEE/INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY IMAGES
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 Russian children had been orphaned by the Civil War, and were put to work in small workshops manufacturing portable electric hand-drills. Their small and nimble fingers were ideal for the camera’s assembly. Called the FED—after the FE Dzerzhinsky Labour Commune in Ukraine, where the children worked—the rangefinder camera was mass-produced from 1934 until around 1996.Image by LONDON EXPRESS/GETTY IMAGES
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 for covert uses such as surveillance or document copying. When West German authorities arrested East German double agent Heinze Felfe in 1961, they found a dozen Minox films in his briefcase. Soviet spy Christopher John Boyce also used a later version of the camera, the Minox B, to copy top secret documents detailing the US satellite reconnaissance programme. In 1972, the Watergate scandal was recorded on Minox, which led to resignation of US President Richard Nixon.Image by ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
