With all the cameras from the 1900-1960 period I use to photograph junkyards and races, the box cameras are the ones I love best. Simple and cheap, like a Model T Ford, the box camera put photography in the hands of ordinary people around the world, starting in the 1880s and continuing into the late 20th century. While readying some of my favorite box cameras from a century ago for a trip to my favorite High Plains wrecking yard, I realized that I lacked a box camera made for once-commonplace 127 film. Since 127 is unobtainium now (I cut my own from larger 120 film), such cameras are cheap; soon, I had an Ansco Dollar Camera (also known as the Ansco Kiddie Camera) in hand.
Starting in 1910, the Dollar Camera sold for… a dollar. That’s more like $26 today, but it was still a cheap way to shoot photographs at the time. Measuring just a few inches tall and getting eight rectangular photographs from a roll of 127 film, the Dollar Camera is much more compact than the vast-selling (and more costly) Kodak Brownie No. 2 of the same era.
Nearly every old camera I obtain must be disassembled, cleaned, and repaired, and the Ansco Dollar Camera was no exception; I rebuilt the shutter assembly, fixed the prism viewfinder, and other tasks that didn’t take very long on such a simple device. However, I made the mistake of reinstalling the lens backwards, an error I didn’t catch until after I brought the camera to the Arse Freeze-a-Palooza 24 Hours of Lemons race at Sonoma Raceway. The effect was interesting (some flip their lenses on purpose to get it), but not what I wanted. Once I got back to Denver and caught the problem, I reinstalled the lens correctly and took the camera to a local self-service junkyard for another try. It worked very well, as you can see in the gallery above.
So now I’ve got this foursome of box cameras, made to use 00, 127, 120, and 118 film, respectively, and all of them work. Check in later to see how they do capturing appropriately elderly machinery.
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