I brought 2 cameras back to Boston that I have not used for a long time. 1 is my very first camera which my parents gave to me when I was like, 7. A minolta autopak which is about as high tech as the Holga. This little camera also makes square photos. I never tried shooting black and white with it, and when I left it behind for college, it somehow got broken - the film advancer jammed and so it has been virtually unused for 10 + years. I was determined to get the thing fixed in Boston and brought it back to me. Kort picked it up, took off the face plates, pulled out his screwdriver kit and unjammed the mechanism in 2 minutes. My hero! The camera brings back feelings of nostalgia and first seeing. In tons of childhood photos that my parents took, I am holding my little Minolta on our family vacations and weekend trips - it was as important to me as books, which were very important. The Pai children were not really encouraged to play or be outdoors much, given the dangers of the external world and the knowledge of that world (how positively Siddarthan) - so experience came through books and language and abstract interpretation as mediated through some other form, i.e. art.

The 2nd camera is a little blue box camera I bought at the Brown Elephant Thrift Store on Halstead in Chicago when I lived in Boystown in 1999. It takes 120 film and has to be loaded in the dark and the seams have to be taped. It is very basic and would be great for blueprint photography (a blue camera for blue prints, hmm...) which require super long exposures or for night photography possibly. It may be possible to convert it into a pinhole too.