pixhellated

This is the one thing that started everything. As the title says, it is a 1931 Kodak No. 2 Brownie Box camera, Model F. The winding key differentiates it from the U.S. and U.K versions from that year. The U.S. model had a winding knob in 1931 as did the U.K. model. The Canadian model is basically the U.S. variant of the model F that was sold from 1929 to 1930 with a film winding key.

It was my grandmother's. She bought it used when she was a twenty-something post office employee in High River, Alberta, in the Dirty Thirties. She photographed everything with it from her family to her dogs to the floods that happened over and over for that decade. About forty years later what was her first camera became my first camera on my fifth birthday. It was a magical thing and I took so many pictures with it that did not turn out at all. I have none of them left, however.

I wound up homeless in my early twenties, which means I lost most of my stuff. I did manage to hang onto this camera, which is no mean feat. It is my most prized possession and I will be devastated if I ever lose it. I should probably keep it in a safe deposit box, but it is one of those things I need to have near me. To see and to occasionally hold.

I do need to hold it. Sometimes when I do I can feel my grandmother's larger hands over my smaller ones showing me how to hold the camera at waist height to compose a picture through the odd viewfinder and smell her lavender perfume. I have never stopped missing her, but she gave me her love of photography and I have that every day even with her being gone.