Amateur Photographer Magazine

Roger Hicks is Back From the Front - Knowledge is his most cherished possession

Thursday 10th April 2008

Roger Hicks

Years ago, when they were still affordable, I used to collect old Leicas and accessories. I remember finding a stereo beamsplitter and viewer for £25 (nowadays you'd need to put a couple of noughts on the end of that price); a 21mm finder for a fiver; infrared filters for a pound or 30s (£1.50) each; and a 90mm f/4 Elmar for £11 10s (£11.50).

Then I realised two things. One was that I had an altogether ridiculous amount of money tied up in kit I didn't use. The other was that I took no pleasure in merely owning it. As regular readers of this column will know, I have a love-hate relationship with possessions: sometimes it feels like I am drowning in them.

So, in about 1975, I sold my collection. Well, almost all of it, although I still have my very first Leica IIIa. Since then, I'll buy only stuff that I really want to use or stuff that I can play with for a while, learn all I can about, and then sell on, preferably for a modest profit, or at a small loss, which represents the cost of playing with it – a sort of rental fee. If I can get an article out of it, better still. I call this 'serial collecting'.

The thing is, I regard collecting, be it cameras or anything else, as a sort of character flaw. It's hardly a serious flaw, and it's one to which most of us succumb from time to time. For years, for example, I collected pigs: china, glass, lead, plastic, you name it. Nowadays, I may buy two or three pigs in a decade, and be given another two or three. My wife is the same about dolls: she has quite a few, but most are heirlooms dating back to the 1880s or so, or from when she was a little girl. Again, she may now buy one or two a decade. Her old dolls and my old pigs have attained a sort of sentimental value, but that is not the same as continuing to build a collection.

Of course, there are collectors who are different, and are as methodical and knowledgeable as specialist museum curators, and I salute them. Most are generous with their knowledge – Paul-Henry van Hasbroeck and the late Colin Glanfield are among numerous shining examples. But most people (including me) lack the wherewithal, the storage space and, above all, the sheer application that it takes to become a serious camera collector.

Many more collectors are more akin to pack rats, hating to see anything thrown away. I place myself in this category. Sometimes, if you are reasonably knowledgeable, this can pay dividends. I have a comparison densitometer, made (as far as I can tell) some time between 1890 and 1930, given to me with the words, 'Any idea what this is?' I hadn't at the time, but between trying to understand how it worked, and hunting about in old magazines, I finally found out.

More often, though, pack-ratting just brings an accumulation of more junk. This includes cameras that are not worth the effort of selling, because they are worth so little, often less than the cost of sending them by insured post. Some day, I shall get around to taking a stand at a camera fair, or finding out how eBay works – until then, I have chests full of the things.

Therefore, I am most interested in cameras worth, say, £50 to £200 – cheap enough that I can afford them, expensive enough to make it worth the effort of selling them on. Generally, I prefer usable ones, just to see what they are like, even though this could be said to take time away from taking 'real' pictures with 'real' cameras.

The enormous advantage of this approach is that there is only one collection, out of all the collections I have amassed over the years, that I really value, and that is knowledge. Serial collecting feeds that collection.

Knowledge is entertaining for its own sake: seeing the ways people solve problems, then seeing the ways that other people solve the problems that the problem-solvers created. It is also a useful counterbalance when you are disaffected. I know my Leicas aren't perfect, but I'm not fool enough to think that anything else would be better. And because I've wrestled with all sorts of other, less perfect cameras, I appreciate what I've got – which translates directly into better pictures. AP

Roger and Frances website

Got an opinion on this story? Why not post a comment on our message boards

Back to index