GPL Project Proposal

The Voigtländer Nokton 25mm f/0.95 MFT:
Resolving the world through the fast and shallow view of a single prosumer lens

In this paper I plan to examine how various threads of mediated global technoculture converge in around and through the above-mentioned camera lens. Inspired by the Lury’s writings about tourist objects and the Sean Cubitt talk I attended at ISEA Istanbul in which he encouraged the academic interrogation of media technologies and the systems that produce them, I am interested in how an object such as a camera lens might serve as an in-point for critical analysis. Investigative paths leading from this approach include 1) the culture of an online community of digital video technology enthusiasts 2) the tensions of progress and nostalgia in video technology 3) the international history of camera lens brands and manufacturers and 4) the aesthetics of emptiness I see within the media objects produced and shared within the online communities discussing and gushing over this Voigtländer lens.

At this stage of the project, I will admit that I do not have a clear conclusion in mind about what this will all add up to. I have a strong sense that the investigation will lead to productive insights. The online community in question is called dvxuser.com. At its start, the site was dedicated to a camera that is now quite outdated, so that even in its name, ‘DVX User’, we can start to see some of the interesting tensions of technological enthusiasm. Another thing I find fascinating about the community is that simultaneous to its devotion to the newest most cutting edge tech, the ultimate dreams and desires for those technologies is to basically perform and function as well and attractively as 35mm motion picture film, cameras and lenses, albeit at a much lower cost of purchase and production.

The industrial history around the Voigtländer 25mm lens is also representative of this movement forward towards the past in a number of ways. The venerable Voigtländer brand is Viennese and goes back to the 18th century but was purchased in the 1990s by a Japanese manufacturer called Cosina that had previously mostly produced OEM lenses to be sold under the brand names of other companies such as the German behemoth Zeiss - Japanese expertise sold with an Austrian aura of legacy. None of these companies or stories was of much interest within the video community until Cosina decided to make a new lens for a new camera format that just became popular because of a Panasonic video camera adeptly situated at the price frontier of prosumer and professional gear. The lens they came out with blew away the rather paltry offerings that were available for the format at the time, in terms of quality, functionality and price. This sparked a worldwide shortage of the lenses and fueled the intense, covetous discussions that I first piqued my interest. The system of authorized retail and gray market distribution of the lens is another interesting area I plan to explore.

Where I want to end up, and where I will probably introduce a mixed-media aspect to the project, is in an examination of the media objects created and shared alongside these text-based discussions of the lens. What people like about the lens is it has a breathtakingly fast f-stop, meaning that it allows lots and lots of light into the lens and can capture very clean, rich images in very low, naturally occurring lighting situations at quality levels previously impossible for this range of cameras. I will argue that there are political dimensions to these aesthetic possibilities when relatively low-priced technologies are capable of producing images that would rival our expectations of expensive Hollywood output. All well and good except that the other quality of the lens that makes it sought after, and the flip side of a very fast f-stop, is that it has a very shallow depth of field, meaning that when a subject is in focus, everything else will be blurred. So even as the technology is capable of seeing more, it sees less. I will argue that this is more than just a fact of optics, but is part of a cultural aesthetic obsession driven by a desire to emulate the taken for granted aesthetics of a particular brand of Hollywood output rather than push technology and art into new possibilities for the representation of contemporary experience. I will curate and discuss examples of user-generated videos using the Voigtländer lens to support this idea. I also have an idea for a short, creative companion video piece that I want to develop more before trying to write about it.