Nikon EM – The Story of a Camera /  by Nathan Jones

My father’s Nikon EM mounted with a 35 mm f/2.5 E Series lens. Not clearly visible in this photograph is the fact that the rewind crank is missing.

This is not a review. This is the story of a camera. Not of a camera make and model, but of a particular camera in the world, a camera that made its way by route and hands unknown from Japan to sub-Saharan Aftica, a camera that found itself amidst the history of a country in turmoil, a camera that touched the life of my family. This is a story of life after death. And it’s an unfinished story that I intend to keep telling for the rest of my days.

Keep reading …

Retrospective/We are the stories we tell ourselves of who we are /  by Nathan Jones

From 2009-2012, or thereabouts, I carried a Rolleiflex TLR camera with me wherever I went. Almost invariably it was loaded with black-and-white film, which I developed in my bathroom at home. Today I began the process of re-examining the archive of my negatives with the goal of producing a photobook that seeks to make thematic sense of my relationship to photography over the last 15 years. (The four photographs shown above were taken in London, Toronto, and Victoria in late 2009.)

Here is my current selection of photographs for this project.

Here are brief descriptions of my current projects and a list of abandoned/defunct projects.

Denyse Thomasos at the Vancouver Art Gallery /  by Nathan Jones

“Process is an insistence of structure.”
— Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012)

Virtual Incarceration (1999). Acrylic on canvas.

Metropolis (2007). Acrylic, charcoal and porous-point marker on canvas.

Excavations: Courtyards in Surveillance (2007). Acrylic on canvas.

A wonderful afternoon with Sofia at the Vancouver Art Gallery after a delicious dad-and-daughter brunch at Sophie’s Cosmic Café on the first day of spring break. The works of the Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos provoked strong positive reactions and much animated conversation. (The full-scale images and details of the three paintings shown above were made on my iPhone. These photographs do not do the works justice. They are enormous and must be experienced in person.)

Writing on Photography /  by Nathan Jones

In 2010/2011, I ran a film-photography blog called The Photon Fantastic (now defunct). During this time, I wrote several among the following series of articles as part of a larger, collaborative project called The Beginner's Guide to Film Photography, which unfortunately was never finished. I am collecting them here as a navigational aid for newcomers to this blog, and also as the first step in my own return to the project. I intend to complete the writing by mid-2025 and publish the guide as a book by the end of that year.

I've also written less technical, more philosophical, and much more opinionated articles about photography. They say I'm polarizing. Oh well.

I'm fascinated by the multitude of ways that photographers think and speak about their art. To my mind, photography is a very slippery thing and it takes a lot of thinking to penetrate the surface of what it is. Here's a (growing) collection of thoughts on photography by great practitioners and critics.

If you’re interested in the tools of the trade, I have begun to write detailed experiential and technical reviews of the cameras in my collection, beginning with the Nikon bodies. To date these are: