Now in its 10th year (the last five as national competitions), this latest Krappy Kamera Show, a collection of 36 images by 30 photographers, is likely the best yet. Though literally rough around the edges and often mushy of focus and detail, these photos belie the notion that high tech is necessarily the best tech in today’s digital world.

The cameras used here are either homemade out of everyday objects like paint cans and toilet paper rolls, with tiny holes for lenses, or they come from almost toy-like cameras with plastic lenses and no creative controls such as adjustable focus and exposure. Today’s so-called “throwaway” cameras are too fancy to qualify for this show.

But if you visit the gallery (something I strongly recommend), you don’t have to know anything about cameras—crummy or otherwise—to enjoy the pictures. They stand on their own.


An extraordinary example is Mellon Square, in which John Fobes turns a simple, back-lit chair into a sublimely patterned study of shadow and fiery light. Fobes’s camera, which happens to be a film box with pin-hole lens, stretches the image vertically into the realm of surreality and, more importantly, beauty.

Simple cameras often render an unexpected other-worldliness to simple subjects, as in Jill Stoll’s shimmering Central Park image of a park lamp and leaves called Luminaire, Mark Starkman’s sketch-like Road, and Tim Timmermans’s minimal but mysterious compostion, Crypt, for instance.

Bob Gervais, on the other hand, ably handles complexity. His Grand Central Station, a multiple exposure incorporating interior and exterior imagery, is a luminescent abstraction, and one of the most originally conceived photographs of the landmark building that I have seen.

For technical reasons, most “krappy kamera” pictures tend to be static, their power dervived from subtle qualities of light and form, not from fleeting action. But Scott Raffe’s Fire Hydrant is an exception. The photo depicts young children playing amid spray on a flooded urban street, their mothers standing nearby. It is a crudely composed, sepia-toned moment that evokes the eerie feel of a distant childhood memory.

Entangled, a double-exposed photograph of two children in the woods, by Ruth Sikes, also taps the psyche more than it records the world. The child’s ghostly form in the background is a brilliant touch, and a little spooky.

If this is your first visit to the Soho Photo Gallery, a Tribeca institution (despite its name) since 1979, don’t make it your last. It is a members’ cooperative, founded in 1971 by New York Times photographers and, though its shows often are uneven, there almost always is something to see that makes the trip worthwhile.

As for the Krappy Kamera Show, its pictures come from around the country and were juried by Monica Polack of the recently closed Soho Triad gallery. Winners and honorable mentions were awarded, but never mind that. You be the judge.

“The Krappy Kamera Show” is at Soho Photo Gallery, 15 White St., March 4–29. Open Thur., 6–8; Fri.–Sun., 1–6,