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By NADJA SAYEJ
| August 17, 2011, 9:30 am
A woman sits on the door to the Imago 1:1, a giant camera that takes life-size photographs.
If you think Polaroid cameras are old school (and expensive), try the Imago 1:1.
This one-of-a-kind, walk-in camera takes life-size photos on 24-by-79-inch paper, $480 a pop. Built in 1972 in Munich, it has been tucked behind closed doors for more than 30 years but recently found a permanent home in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. And best of all, anyone can use it.
The American artist Robert Wilson has posed for the Imago, and so have the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and Renate Künast, the Berlin mayoral candidate from the Alliance ‘90/The Greens party. Mostly couples love to go in and pose naked. Traditional family portraits are a close second.
“You get the photo in 10 minutes, just like a photo booth,” says the artist Susanna Kraus, who opened the street-level storefront this June.
The Imago was built as a hobby project by Susanna’s father, the physicist Werner Kraus, and his friend, the artist Erhard Hössle. By the mid-1980s their source for photo paper dried up, and the camera landed in the basement of the Neue Sammlung Museum in Munich. A few years ago, Susanna pulled it out, and somehow convinced Harman Technology Ltd., a British photo paper company based in Liverpool, to make the special, large-format positive paper required to operate it.
“You are the subject and photographer in one person,” says Kraus, who does all the behind-the-scenes work like loading and developing the paper. I handed Kraus my digital camera and asked if she knew how to work it. She did not. “If you ask me to take photos with a different camera, I will have a lot of problems.”
If you aren’t happy with the initial result, Kraus allows do-overs. But one thing she does not allow. “We do not change anything,” she says adamantly. “No Photoshop.”
The Imago 1:1 Camera is at Prinzenstrasse 85, Berlin. For information or to make an appointment, go to imago1to1.com.
