香港雖然在相機工業方面,算不上是一個重要城鎮,主流相機也是以進口為主,但出現了一個國際級相機品牌 Holga,以下介紹一下Holga的歷史
Holga 之父Mr. T.M. Lee
The Holga camera was designed by T. M. Lee, and first appeared in 1982. At the time, 120 rollfilm in black-and-white was the most widely available film in mainland China. The Holga was intended to provide an inexpensive mass-market camera for working-class Chinese in order to record family portraits and events.After the cameras began to be distributed in the West, some photographers took to using the Holga for its surrealistic, impressionistic scenes for landscape, still life, portrait, and especially, street photography. In this respect, the Holga became the successor to the Diana and other 'toy' cameras previously used in such work. A Holga photograph by David Burnett of former vice-president Al Gore during a campaign appearance earned a top prize in a 2001 White House News Photographers' Association Eyes of History award ceremony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holga
In the 1960s, Hong Kong with its strategically located deep-water port and source of cheap labor, quickly became a light industrial manufacturing center. Innovation and drive ensured Hong Kong’s cheap products were to be found the world over. Everything from toys, to electrical equipment and cameras, were cheaply made and shipped quickly the world over.
One such product was of course the beloved Diana toy camera and its many clones. Each made by a different factory, all exploiting the cheap manufacturing base and effective distribution channels.
While Hong Kong island was the seat of government, entertainment and the playground for the rich, the other side of Victoria Harbour was the home to these light manufacturers. In Kowloon and the New Territories, areas like Tai Kok Tsui, Lai Chi Kok, and Hung Hom saw thousands of manufacturers develop.
With limited space, these manufacturers constructed their factories and offices in a unique Hong Kong way; vertical, stacked tightly in rows, along crowded streets hustling with trucks and pushcarts.
So, on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year, Tony Lim and Skorj met at the entrance to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Their objective – to journey to Hung Hom and to have an interview with the inventor & manufacturer of the modern day Diana – the Holga camera – and to find out how & why it came to being a most successful toy camera.
Tony went to ask Skorj if he wanted to walk the 20 minutes to the Holga office instead of taking a taxi. However, when he saw Skorj’s sweaty shirt, he realized that it would be a tough walk for such a long way under the mid-summer Hong Kong sun. So they took a taxi.
The streets of Hung Hom are still crowded with factories and shops as they were in the 1960s. The buildings look the same, the pavements are still cluttered with pushcarts, and workers still hurry from place to place.
Upon arrival at Universal Electronics Ltd, they were ushered quietly into a humbly furnished meeting room and offered tea and coffee. They were excited – Skorj prepared his Fujipet and Tony his Diana.
Mr. T.M. Lee appeared and offered his greetings in Cantonese. Skorj replied, ‘Neih hou mah?’, amusing both Tony and Mr. Lee with his gweilo Cantonese. After introductions, they started by asking an interesting question; why did you use the name ‘Holga’?
The answer was interesting as well – as its represents a good summary of the company’s heritage. Mr. Lee had established the company in 1969, and it was to become a well-known flash unit manufacturer. Using the initials of others involved in the establishment of the company (Wing On Cheung), he had used ‘WOC’ as names for their flash units and the Chinese characters for ‘very bright’ as their logo.
In Cantonese, the pronunciation of the ‘very bright’ characters is ‘Hol-gohn’, or Anglicized to ‘Holga’. Thus following the production of award-winning WOC flash-units, they turned their production experience to complete cameras called ‘WOCA’ and ‘Holga’…
At this point Skorj suggested the Anglicized pronunciation of ‘Holga’ is one of its success factors. As it is snappy, falls off the tongue nicely, and sounds like other famous camera brands such as Kodak, Canon, Nikon and so on…
As, in 1974 Konica had released their first compact camera with a built-in flash – the C35 EF. As a result of this, and other camera manufactures following this lead, the sales of stand-alone flash units fell.
In response to this threat, Mr. Lee and his Universal Electronics started to think about possible solutions. It diversified its product lines to professional flash units and also decided to develop new product lines, some of which might shift their domain from being just a photographic accessory manufacturer to that of a camera maker too.
As a result of these initiatives, on 4 January 1982 the Holga 120SF integrated flash camera was born. Mr. Lee suggests the 120SF was the world’s first 120-format camera with a built-in flash unit! To our knowledge, this is still the only kind of 120-format camera with built-in flash.
Though the Holga and it variants can now be considered a success in the toy camera world, this was not always so, as for the first ten years of its life, the company was not satisfied with Holga sales.
According to Mr. Lee, the target market for the Holga was Mainland China. This was primarily to avoid competing with the Japanese and Taiwanese cameras globally who were making and effectively distributing many mass-produced cameras, though at a higher price.
Mr. Lee considered a camera was still a luxury product in China during these years; therefore, he specifically lowered the production cost, made the camera as simple as possible, while attempting to maintain a minimum production quality. It had to be not only extremely cheap to manufacture, but it also had to work properly and maintain a minimum level of reliability. This original intent was not to produce a wonderful toy camera.
As an example of his production intent, Mr. Lee had wanted the Holga to be able to produce both 6×6 and 645 photographs, so he designed the Holga to have the removable mask and 12/16 frame counter slider functions. Upon testing however he was disappointed that in 6×6 mode the camera produced what he considered an unacceptable level of ‘four-corners-dark’, so accordingly he issued a manufacturing instruction to glue the previously designed 12/16 slider switch in the 16 position permanently. Thus supposedly forcing users to use the camera in 645-mode only.
He of course had not considered the ‘bad’ four-corners-dark photographs might be a desirable result for some photographers. The now famous Holga vignette is considered to be one of its most outstanding attributes of using cameras of this type. Other toy cameras are now measured by their level of vignette, and often photographs with a heavy vignette are called ‘Holga’ photographs, regardless of their source.
Unfortunately for cheap products, in the early 1980s China’s economic situation changed due to Deng’s new reform plan. As a result Chinese were looking for – and were able to afford – better quality products from its neighbors such as Japan and Taiwan.
In the early 1990s, the company started to get significant orders from overseas. The Holga was becoming well known in toy camera photography. The Lomographic Society repackaged the cameras and promoted it as a trendy camera for ‘Lomographers’ worldwide. This made it even a bigger hit in the toy camera field. More orders came, and then more still. Mr. Lee had to increase production capacity for a product that had previously seen its sales falling…
‘It was out of my imagination’, said Mr. Lee rather proudly.
He had never thought a product with falling sales could be re-born almost twenty years from its original launch. Though, was it declining or preparing for its mature period of its product life cycle? No matter how it comes, Mr. Lee said they sold 100,000 units of Holga during the fiscal year of 2003-2004.
In a parallel story, Mr. Lee had intended to discontinue the 135 Holga ‘Meow’ camera. The Meow was designed to attract the attention of your cat when you photograph it by flashing lights and making strange noises.
However, one trader bought all the remaining dead stock, shipped it to Japan, and marketed it as the Holga ‘Nya-Nya’ (‘meow’ in Japanese). As a result, the sales were very successful in Japan, and Universal Electronics now makes dedicated Japan market 135 Nya-Nya Holgas.
Many customers and distributors are clamering for more Holga functions and accessories. To accommodate them Mr. Lee has made plans on accessories for Holga, including filter sets, 6×6 film masks, color flashes, tripod sokcets, B-function and more. His distributors sell Oyako Sets, 35mm adapters, fisheye lenses, Snow Holgas, Baby 110 Holgas, Holga t-shirts, and Holga books. Tony himself being responsible for a 135 mask development.
In a reflection of the business environment that saw the establishment of the Holga, Universal Electronics now outsources the production of lenses for both WOCA and Holga cameras, and has seen a steady increase in quality as a result. ‘Too sharp’, we cry… While perhaps not to toy camera user’s tastes, this has resulted in Universal Electronics being able to maintain their cost effective manufacturing.
Mr. Lee of course no longer glues the frame counter switch in the ‘16’ position, and ships new Holgas with a 6×6 mask and a 645 mask. The tea with Mr. Lee concluded with Tony and Skorj telling him they enjoyed the four-corners-dark, and looked forward to more interesting developments from Universal Electronics.
http://scissorxarm.blogspot.com/2008/04/history-of-holga.html
一本介紹Holga的書
http://nicnichols.com/FourCornersDark/?page_id=438
來吧BB大作戰 