Tokyo mid-summer, the whole city was literally sizzling. You could turn a piece of sidewalk into a hot dog grill and do a roaring business on the Ginza.

Photos taken on the fly with my first Holga 120n in Kodak colour. I had just sworn off cameras after a very exhausting course in “intermediate” photography, in which I wound up hating anything with a LCD screen and batteries (still won’t pick up a digital cam to this day), and I thought there must be something else and wham bam, someone said the magic word to me one day – Get a bloody Holga, silly.

It was a black plastic box with a plastic lens and it costed me US$20. The film was more expensive than the “camera”. But, I was game for something new. Took a while to get a hang of it, unlike an SLR, you can’t really focus with a Holga. Most times it was point, adjust a little over to the side (the viewfinder was to the left of the lens), click and hope for the best.

I thought the photos were horrible when I first saw them, promptly chucked that Holga out with the trash and then went shopping on ebay for the perfect 120n box. It was years later that I really saw how incredible these photos were, well better now than never.

~ ANDERS, 2011

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