Pause - Diana Photographs by Reed Weimer

To celebrate the 2023 Month of Photography Denver festival, artist Reed Philip Weimer  is exhibiting a collection of photographs he made with a Diana camera.

“Back around 1990 I was talking with my photographer friends Mark Sink, Eric Havelock Baile and Shaun Gothwaite. I mentioned that I was bored with my 35mm SLR Minolta. Soon thereafter they generously handed me some Diana cameras along with instructions for preparing them to work properly. They promised that l wouldn’t be bored, and they were correct. These were the only cameras I used for quite a while.

A Diana or one of its variants were originally plastic toy cameras made in Hong Kong in the 1960s. They cost a dollar at the Dime store or you might win one at a carnival for knocking over enough bottles. They are real cameras, however, and can take striking photographs with a vignetted image that resembles a dream or memory with clear focus only in the center, the rest fading out around the edges. (The Diana has been used to specifically take soft focus, impressionistic photographs somewhat reminiscent of the Pictorialist Period of artistic photography, branded in contemporary times as Lomography.) Lots of things can go wrong when you use one these little guys and that’s part of the deal. Sometimes everything goes wrong. Their primitive nature leads you to look at things differently and their surprising results lead you to appreciate different things. Thanks for taking a look.” — Reed Philip Weimer