Viva la square!
Wanted to share a few photo essays I’ve been viewing this week. The commonality here, other than great photography, is the format – square.
The square medium format is a wonderful little niche in photography that is unfortunately getting smaller, as more people move to the easier/cheaper digital option (square digital does exist, but yikes it’s expensive). About 12 years ago I bought a Mamiya C330, a square format TLR which I absolutely adore and will never sell no matter that it’s mostly acting as a gorgeous desk ornament these days. A few years ago I bought the Mamiya 6, a square format (6×6) rangefinder that I still use and love more than a normal person should love a machine. Framing a square image, seeing the world in square, is just different than 35mm, its’ hard to explain. It’s very limiting in some ways, and yet it opens a new world of creativity that you don’t see through the standard framelines of 35mm.
So here is Paolo Woods’ wonderful essay from Iran:
and Jason Andrew’s reportage from Abkhazia:
Not enough time to go into all the great 6×6 shooters out there, but no discussion of the square would be complete without the peerless Philip Blenkinsop:
