Fifty Cents' Worth of Camera
Nancy Rexroth's 1977 book IOWA was shot in Ohio on a plastic Diana camera that wholesaled for about fifty cents. Her first retrospective just opened in Cincinnati.
In the 1960s, the Diana camera wholesaled for about fifty cents. They came out of a plastic factory in Kowloon by the case, and most of them were never sold at all: they were prizes at fairs, giveaways at raffles, something you got for buying enough of something else. The lens was a piece of molded plastic. The focus was a rumor, the corners went dark, and the seams of the housing leaked light onto the film, so every so often a frame came back with a stripe through it. Most photographers treated its flaws as limits.
In 1969 a professor at Ohio University, Arnold Gassan, handed one to a graduate student named Nancy Rexroth. She didn't treat them as limits. She kept the blur and the dark corners and spent the next few years in the small towns around Athens, Ohio, photographing white frame houses, kids, beds, bedroom doors and the light in a room at four in the afternoon, all of it slightly out of reach and slightly underwater.
In 1977 she put the pictures in a book and called it IOWA. They weren't taken in Iowa. She grew up in the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, and Iowa was where her relatives lived, a place she visited as a kid and remembered like a dream. The book is Ohio wearing the name of somewhere she'd only been a child in. Rexroth described the whole thing as “a kind of psychic journey from one emotional mood to the next,” in “a place which is very exotic.” Violet Press in Rochester, New York, printed it. It is generally counted as the first printed monograph made entirely with a plastic camera. Aperture had already run a portfolio of her work in 1974, in its The Snapshot issue, next to Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.
The camera caught up with the reputation, as cameras do. Lomography has since revived the Diana and sells it for exactly that soft-focus, vignetted look. The book went out of print, became a collector's item, and came back in 2017 from University of Texas Press, $45, with a foreword by Alec Soth and 22 pictures nobody had seen. The Cincinnati Art Museum began acquiring her archive that same year, more than 400 vintage prints in the end.
On October 2 it opened her first retrospective, Secrets of My Power: more than 150 pieces, plenty of them one-offs, in Gallery 234, and free. Curator Nathaniel Stein, in the museum's announcement: “her photographs are physically small, but they speak with immense power.” It runs until January 3.
The museum is selling a 224-page catalogue. The camera cost fifty cents. The catalogue is $74.95.