So I was out yesterday shooting for the Street Photography challenge when I came across Filemon, a real street photography who has been taking and developing b/w portraits on the plaza of Santa Cruz, Bolivia for the passed 59 years. He has been using the same camera for six decades! He first takes a negative on paper, develops it in a developer and fixer bath inside the camera, mounts the negative on a board in front of the camera, makes another exposure, and then develops two positive images for the customer. He controls the shutter by removing the lens cap for "about one second." The two prints cost about $3.00US. While Filemon has been taking pictures on the plaza, the city has grown from a sleepy little hamlet of maybe 50,000 residents, into a chaotic city of over 1.5 million people. |