page_title: Toy camera
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Toy camera / Lomography / History
caption_attribution_description: Shot by Koray Löker during the Siren2006 Reggea/Dub/Jungle Fest @ Kilyos/Istanbul/Turkey
context_page_description: Within the field of photography, a toy camera is a simple, inexpensive film camera.
  Despite the name, they are in fact always fully functional and capable of taking photographs, albeit with optical aberrations due to the limitations of the simple lenses. From the 1990s onward, there has been interest in the artistic use of such cameras, both those designed for children such as the Diana, and others originally intended as mass-market consumer cameras, such as the Lomo LC-A, Lubitel, and Holga.
  Many professional photographers have used toy cameras and exploited the vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions
  of their inexpensive lenses for artistic effect to take award-winning pictures.
  Toy camera photography has been widely exhibited at many popular art shows, such as the annual "Krappy Kamera" show at the Soho Photo Gallery in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. Various publications such as Popular Photography magazine have extolled the virtues of the Diana camera in its own right as an "art" producing image maker.
context_section_description: The lomography name is inspired by the former state-run optics manufacturer LOMO PLC of Saint Petersburg, Russia that created and produced the 35 mm LOMO LC-A Compact Automat camera, now central to lomography. This camera was loosely based upon the Cosina CX-1 and introduced in the early 1980s. The LOMO LC-A produces "unique, colorful, and sometimes blurry" images.
  The Lomographic Society International was founded in 1992 by a group of Viennese students interested in the LCA, a camera created by LOMO PLC of Saint Petersburg, Russia. Lomography started as an art movement through which the students put on exhibitions of photos; the art movement then developed into the Lomographische AG, a commercial enterprise.
caption: Sample shot from a LOMO LC-A
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