In the fall of 1996, not long after I bought my photo store, there was a flea market in the parking lot on a Saturday. A kid came in looking for film for a camera he’d just bought at the sale — paid a few bucks for it. He was annoyed when I didn’t stock it. In 1996, nobody did. It was a dead format.
I tried to explain that it was actually a remarkable camera. A 110 that accepted interchangeable lenses. I’d never seen one. He wasn’t impressed.
So I offered him five dollars and a disposable camera. He left happy. I got the camera.
It was broken — the advance arm wasn’t engaging — but it didn’t matter. No film anyway. So it went on display, moved from shelf to shelf, store to studio, for the next thirty years.
I recently started buying film stock to test cameras in the collection. When I found a roll of 110, I picked up the Pentax. I was going to run it through a Rolleiflex 110 I have, but that one needs a battery mod first. So I decided it was finally time to fix the camera I’d been moving around for three decades. Twenty minutes, a YouTube video, and a small screwdriver. Done.
I took it for a walk.
The Pentax Auto 110 is the smallest SLR ever made – check out the museum post to see it. The viewfinder might be the smallest I’ve ever looked through. My eyes aren’t what they were, and the shutter is touchy — I tripped it a few times before I was ready. One double exposure from the advance arm acting up mid-roll, though a tap fixed it.
I haven’t shot 110 since I was maybe nine years old. I think I borrowed my mom’s camera for a field trip before I got my own disc camera. I loved it.
I developed the roll in my studio. Twenty-four frames of imperfect, beautiful moments. The grain, the soft edges, the slightly wrong colors — these are the photographs of my childhood. If I’d made any of these with my Z9, I wouldn’t be posting them. Shot on a forty-five-year-old camera I bought for five dollars and a disposable, with film in a format the world gave up on, love them all.
Perspective.

tr/trp