'Little boxes, little boxes ... and they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.'
(With acknowledgement to Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger)

MONG photographers in the years up to about 1960 there was a Great Divide. Those who used box cameras and those who didn’t. Those who didn’t tended to look down on those who did as ‘just snapshotters’. After about 1960 hardly anyone used a box camera. Among collectors there is, unfortunately, a somewhat similar divide between those who include a few box cameras in their collection, and those who regard box cameras as uninteresting junk.
 

A Kodak advert from 1931

    To my mind, those who regard box cameras as just junk are missing out. Box cameras are an important part of photographic and social history. All right, they aren’t shining examples of quality precision camera engineering. Some of them are just about as basic and crude as you can get in something that holds a film and takes a picture through a lens, but they introduced millions of people to photography. Some people remained box-camera snapshotters, content with filling family albums, shielding tiny viewfinders from the sun with their hand to get dozens of pictures of where they went on holiday, the kids, Aunt Maude, Cousin Doris, old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. If the people in the pictures were recognisable, they were happy. They didn't aspire to photography as a hobby. For others the box camera was the first stepping stone to a fascinating hobby. The snapshot of a snapshotter in the page heading was taken with an Ensign box camera in 1936. The blank sky and short greyscale is typical of orthochromatic film in the 1930s.
     

1930s family snapshot

But never mind high-sounding phrases like photographic and social history. I find box cameras interesting in themselves. If you don’t - yet - don’t immediately flip to another page. Stay with me for a bit. There are more interesting things about box cameras than you may have thought. Who knows, you too might become interested in this sub-section of camera collecting. One thing’s for sure, it needn’t cost you a fortune if you do. You can still pick them up very cheaply in car boot sales, flea markets, junk shops and charity shops, though they’re less thick on the ground than they were a few years ago. If you find an interest in them, pick up a few now before most of those outside collections get thrown into the waste crusher and the price of those that are left starts to go up because they're Wow! Rare!. Some sellers think that's already happened.
     Box cameras have been around since the dawn of photography. Fox Talbot used a mahogany box with a lens on the front to make his historic pictures of Laycock Abbey in 1835, but I’m using the term to mean the popular type of box-shaped camera made from the latter part of the nineteenth century to about 1960. Oh, they aren't all made out of ticky-tacky, and they don't all look just the same. Well, not quite all.

THE most popular size film for box cameras was 120 or 620 though a few small ones were made to take 127. The most popular format was 6x9cm, or 2 ¼ x 3 ¼ inches which gave the user a choice of ‘portrait’ or ‘landscape’ shape and provided contact prints large enough to put in the family album.
     This governed the width of the camera to about 3 ¼ inches, and this width remained throughout its life. Some makers in the early 1900s, Ensign was one, put the two film chambers at the back, one at the top and one at the bottom with a door at the back for loading, which made the camera quite tall, about 6 inches square in the side view.
    

The incredible shrinking box

 Kodak made it much more compact by putting the film chambers at the top and bottom in the empty space just behind the lens and shutter panel and leading the film back, across the focal plane over a pair of thin rollers, and forward again to the take-up spool. To load the camera you undid a couple of catches, pulled out the retractable winding key and slid the body of the camera back and off leaving the film path hanging on the front panel. This made the camera much more compact by knocking about 2 inches off the height and, with a leather handle at the top, made it much easier for the snapshotter to carry around on holiday. It set the pattern for most box cameras for the rest of their era. Some people say that if the user leaves a long time between exposures the film develops a kink where it curves sharply over the rollers, giving an out of focus strip across the negative, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this.
     Most box cameras had simple meniscus lenses or at the best cemented doublets, and optical theory says that these give fewer aberrations if the aperture stop is put in front of the lens, so on earlier cameras everyone put the aperture and the shutter in front of the lens. Aberrations aside, this had two other advantages. It sunk the lens deep inside the opening at the front so it was provided with a built-in lens hood and it kept dirt, dust, sand and general grime off the front of the lens. The user was much less likely to scrub away at the lens to ‘clean’ it with a dirty handkerchief, grinding in the dust and grit till the surface looked more like frosted glass than a lens.
     It also had a disadvantage. The camera didn’t look very attractive with a sightless empty eye socket at the front, so some bright marketing lad, possibly again at Kodak, had the idea that the camera would look much better and have greater appeal if it wore its lens at the front where more ‘serious’ cameras wore their front elements. They tried it, and it did look much more attractive. And what do you know? Any increase in aberrations was so small as to be unnoticeable. It had another effect as well. The lens moved forward about half and inch, and by putting it in front of the aperture the back focus was reduced so the film plane had to come forward, cutting the length of the camera down to about 4 ¾ inches. This made the camera even more compact and gave it a much better balanced look.
     It also made it much easier to offer simple focusing like 'Near' and 'Distance' by making the lens pull forward on a tube, or offer extras such as a supplementary lens for head and shoulder portraits and a green or yellow filter so that with the new panchromatic film becoming available blue skies could be darkened revealing clouds instead of having a plain blank sky. These extras were brought in front, or behind, the lens by pulling out small metal tags at the side of the camera. The box camera was growing up, and snapshotters had to become more technically minded. The previous style suddenly looked very old fashioned, so all makers followed suit and this set the basic pattern for the box-shaped camera for the rest of its era

IN THE nineteenth century, before shutters settled down to two types, leaf shutters and focal plane shutters, there were several different designs, some of

Simple but effective guillotine shutter

which worked well and some of which didn't. One that did used two sliding strips of metal, one with a hole in it, and one without a hole.The thing looked a bit like a cigar cutter and became known as the guillotine pattern. The shutter on one of my falling plate cameras is a variation of the guillotine pattern, simple but quite ingenious. The two flat metal strips run in a guide on the back of the camera’s front plate behind the stop quadrant, and travel across the lens opening. Both strips act as exposure and capping strips. The rear strip is spring loaded by a long thin coil spring and has a square hole in it to make the 'Instantaneous' exposure. The front strip also has a square hole in it for the T or Time exposure.
     With the shutter at rest the square holes are not lined up, so no light gets to the film. When you press the shutter release a long arm, also spring loaded, pulls the front strip across the lens opening, and this brings the rear strip with it. At the end of their travel the hole in the front plate is opposite the lens opening, but this is still capped by the second plate. Then a spring catch releases the rear plate which flies back across the lens opening to make the I exposure. When you let the release lever go the long arm pulls the second plate back.
     

A kidney hole flip-flop shutter

To make a T exposure you turn a lever on the front of the camera which operates a cam to push both strips halfway across so that the hole in the rear strip is lined up with the lens opening, which is still capped by the front strip. When you press the release lever the mechanism works as before but the rear strip flies only halfway back so the lens opening is uncovered for as long you hold the release down. When you let the release go the front plate flies back halfway to cap the opening and end the exposure.
     It all sounds very complex, but when you see it in action it’s really a quite clever and simple mechanism with very little that can go wrong with it. Mine still works perfectly after 90 to 100 or more years. The big drawback with guillotine shutters was that it was dificult to arrange for them to have more than one even reasonably accurate and reliable speed, and they dropped out of favour in place of the multi-leaf shutter.
      Guillotine and multi-leaf shutters weren't however, fitted to popular box cameras for the masses. T

A flip-flop sector shutter

hey were far too expensive. Once again it was Kodak that set the pattern for box camera shutters with as simple a mechanical shutter as you can get. A thin metal disc, or part of a disc, with a kidney-shaped hole stamped in it was pivoted at its centre on a block of wood and a simple single hairpin spring flicked it round so the kidney hole whipped across the lens opening and made the exposure. The spring was operated by a lever which poked out the side of the camera. A flat metal strip could be slid so that it engaged or didn't engage with a bent-up tag on the disc to hold the shutter open, and this too poked out the side, or top, of the camera and the end was bent over so the user could choose either 'Instantaneous' usually 1/30 to 1/50 sec, or 'Time' exposures.

By adding a paddle the shutter could be made press and release.

The whole thing cost pennies to make and it was reliable because there was really nothing to go wrong with it. Some makers used a cut-out sector instead of a kidney hole, but the principle was the same.
     These shutters can be sub-divided into two types. With one, probably the most common and often called a flip-flop shutter, you push the release lever one way to make the first exposure, then back again to make the second and so on. People soon got used to looking at the lever to see which way it should be pushed.
     Some makers, however, reasoned that the camera felt better in operation if it behaved more like an expensive camera and the release lever returned to its starting position after each exposure. Ensign and Coronet in the UK made box cameras with this type of operation. It was quite easy to achieve. All the maker had to do was arrange the hairpin spring so that the lever and the disc returned to their starting position, and put a paddle-like extension on the operating arm which capped the lens opening so the film wasn't exposed again on the return stroke.
     To anyone accustomed to looking at high precision leaf shutters like a Compur, these box camera shutters are crude in the extreme, bits of tin held to a wooden block by nails, and with generous clearances. But they worked, and kept on working with no attention for up to century or more.

MOST people have heard the story of George Eastman giving away nearly 60,000 box cameras to school children to celebrate Kodak's anniversary. Not quite so many know that in the 1920s and 1930s Kodak factories in the US, Canada and the UK turned out thousands of box cameras under the name Hawk-Eye, and later Hawkeye without the hyphen, for packeted food manufacturers and magazines to give away in promotions

No. 2 Hawkeye Brownie

to people who saved up a sufficient number of coupons. To give away in large numbers they had to be cheap but they had to be sufficiently well made and reliable to take decent pictures for a few years or they would have rebounded on the companies that organised the promotions, and wouldn't have done Kodak's name any good either. They were made from cardboard with a wooden block to hold the meniscus lens and rotary sector shutter, with a few pieces of metal here and there where necessary, and covered in cheap leatherette.
      Many were thrown away, either because the cardboard got wet and warped or because nobody wanted them any more when box cameras went right out of fashion. It's a tribute to their simplicity and basic good design that most of those that survived still work anything up to 80 years later. You can still find them very cheaply in car boot sales and charity

1938 UK Hawkeye De Luxe

shops, many of them looking the worse for wear with the metal fittings going rusty, but collectors are now starting to take an interest in ones that have been looked after and are in top condition so, naturally, the price of these is starting to climb. Kodak made lots of different models over the years, some with coloured leatherette, but I've contented myself for the moment just a couple, not in top condition by any means, but presentable after a good clean and a spot of touch-up paint, and working.
     One is a No.2 Hawkeye Brownie, made in Canada. They were made from 1926 to 1933, so it's anything from 72 to 79 years old years old. It hasn't been particularly well looked after and the once bright nickel bits are now a delicate shade of rust brown, but generally it's survived pretty well. I haven't bothered to restore it, I'll keep it till I find one in better condition.
      The other is a cute little Hawkeye Ace De Luxe, a real baby box taking 127 film. The Ace and the Ace De Luxe were made only in Kodak's UK factory at Harrow on the northern outskits of London, and as far as I know the only difference is that the De Luxe model has two rivets to take a neck strap. In his book Kodak Cameras, The First Hundred Years, Brian Coe lists them as being made only in 1938. I've seen other references where the date is given as 1936, but as Brian Coe used to be the curator of Kodak's museum at Harrow I'm inclined to believe his book. They were made to give away with children's comics, one being Mickey Mouse Comic but by 1938 I'd graduated to all-adventure stories in comics like Rover, Wizard and Hotspur, and I don't remember them. There aren't any reflecting viewfinders, just a wire frame that pulls up at the front, and no backsight. I'll bet the kiddie who got it new 67 years ago was as proud as anything. It's been quite well looked after, and I like to imagine that whoever first owned it he, or she, got some good pictures and went on to make photography a hobby. But then I'm just a sentimental old softie.
Back to top of page

TWO of the early box cameras I’ve got don’t use roll film. They’re classed as magazine falling plate cameras, taking a stack of glass plates, or cut film,

Falling plate box camera about 1900

in metal sheaths, stacked vertically in the back and held with the front one in the focal plane by a big coil spring on the back door. After taking a picture you slid a button on top of the camera which let the front plate drop down to the bottom of the body, and the spring pushed the next one into position. A leaf spring cushioned the falling plate, and stopped the exposed plates from falling around inside the camera when it was turned to the landscape position. The camera had to be loaded and unloaded in the darkroom, but the photographer was saved the trouble of carting a lot of loaded darkslides with him on a photographic outing and changing a darkslide every time he wanted to take a picture.
     Magazine cameras were made in large numbers for 20 or so years from about 1890, many anonymously, but declined in popularity in favour of the roll film box camera, and by the start of the first world war manufacture had pretty well stopped.
     The first of mine wasn’t anonymous

The big coil spring pushes each plate forward in turn.

when it was made. There’s a recess in the leatherette covering, under the carrying handle, which probably held a disc with the maker’s name, but it was missing when I got the camera so I don’t know who made it. It takes quarter plates, 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ in, and is quite large, sturdily made of wood with a leatherette covering. The lens is a single plano-convex (flat on one side and domed on the other). It's quite large, 35mm diamter, and its largest stop, f/11, is only 10.8mm diameter so only the centre part of the lens was used which no doubt helped to keep aberations in check
      There are stops from f/11 to f/32, and the shutter gives I or T exposures, I being about 1/30 sec. On T the shutter stays open as long as you hold down the release. Nowadays it would be called B. There’s no provision for focusing. The two ‘brilliant’ viewfinders are big, clear and bright now I’ve cleaned them, but one of them at some time or other lost its front lens which has been replaced by a plain piece of glass which works OK, but means that the finder isn't quite WYSIWYG.
     The stops are holes in a quadrant plate, each one in turn being brought in front of the lens by a lever on the front of the camera. The last position of the lever is labelled ‘Dust cover’, and brings a blank part of the quadrant across the opening. The shutter is a guillotine pattern, described above. My second falling plate camera's very similar but at the moment it's in pieces undergoing refurbishment.

When Zeiss Ikon was formed in 1926 by amalgamating four major Geman camera makers the directors wanted to cater for everybody from beginners and snapshotters to advanced amateurs and professionals. At the bottom end of the scale this meant having a box camera. But, being Zeiss Ikon they just couldn’t bring themselves to offer something rather crudely made from cardboard, tin, bits of wood and small nails. So they cast around among the nearly 200 models in the combined catalogue and picked out the very well made box camera brought to the amalgamation by Goerz, an old and well respected company. Zeiss Ikon modified it here and there and came up with the aristocrat of box cameras, the Zeiss Ikon Box Tengor, and gave it the model number 54. At first it had just a plain leatherette front, but about 1934 Zeiss Ikon gave it a facelift. They put a black metal edging round the front and put an elongated hexagon shaped panel over the lens. Much cleaner looking and more modern; typical 1930s design.
     I’ve got three of them. The first takes 6x9 pictures on 120 film. For a box camera it’s quite heavy, but then this is no cardboard and wood affair, it’s all

Unmistakably aristocratic

honest to goodness metal. Zeiss Ikon expected users to be reasonably technically minded, and the specification’s pretty good too. There’s only one ‘Instantaneous’ shutter speed, but you’ve got a choice of apertures f/11, f/16 and f/22, and there’s a lever over the top of the lens to give three focusing ranges. The lens by itself is set with a marked depth of field from 8 feet to infinity. When you move the lever to the position marked 8-2 it brings a supplementary lens behind the main lens for groups and full-length portraits. Moving the lever to the 2-1 position changes the supplementary lens for a stronger one for head and shoulders portraits.
     The shutter release is self-return, not flip-flop, and there’s a small lever by the release which acts as a safety catch to save the shutter from being fired accidentally. The same lever can be used to hold the shutter open on long B settings. For the capping paddle for the self-return release they didn’t use just a plain black piece of metal. Oh no, not Zeiss Ikon. They plated it so that when you look in the front of the lens you see a mirror instead of a plain black hole. It looks ‘quality’. One end of the carrying strap is mounted on the front part of the camera, and the other end on the removable back, so when you remove the back to load or unload a film you don’t drop the back in the wet or sand, and don’t put it down somewhere and accidentally sit on it. Another nice touch is that when you take the back off you don’t have to disengage the winding key. The back slots neatly round it. When you load a film you can make sure the key is properly engaged with the take-up spool before putting the back on. Exposure counting is by the usual red window in the back. There are two tripod bushes, one for vertical and one for horizontal pictures
      All thoughtful and useful touches that were no doubt used by salesmen at Zeiss Ikon agents in the 1930s to emphasise to the customer that the Tengor was not just your ordinary box camera. This was a Zeiss Ikon, and justified costing about a third more in the UK than the top of the range Kodak and Ensign boxes.
     My second Box Tengor is about the same age, and very similar, except that it’s smaller and looks just like the big one’s kid brother. As befits a kid brother it takes smaller pictures, 16 instead of eight on 120 film. Also there only two stops, f/11 and f/22, and only one supplementary closer focus lens. There are the usual two red windows in the back for counting exposures, and there’s a sliding cover to lessen the chance of round fog spots when the owner used a faster panchromatic film which, in the 1930s, hadn't got a backing paper quite so opaque as it has now.
     Lastly we come to the baby of the family, the delightful little Baby Box Tengor taking 16 pictures on 127 film. It’s a pocket aristocrat only 2 ½ inches wide by just over 3 inches tall and just over 2 inches front to back. There’s only one aperture, f/11, and a single speed shutter which, in one brochure I saw, the ever-honest and precise Zeiss Ikon copywriter listed as (±) 1/25 sec + B. Well, I suppose ± looked more scientific than ‘about’. There’s no carrying handle and no release lock lever. Nor are there any reflecting viewfinders. Instead there’s a pull-up wire frame finder at the front with a flip-up rear sight..Pretty basic compared with the other two, but an unmistakable aristocrat nonetheless. Mine dates between 1931 and 1933, and has a plain leatherette front, though later models got the 1930s facelift treatment.
Back to top of page

WHEN I picked this austere looking box camera up from a stall in a flea market the first things I noticed were that it was made of metal, finished in black crackle paint and in almost pristine condition. No sign of wood or cardboard. There was no maker’s name to be seen, not on the body nor on

No. 2 Film Pack Hawk-eye

the carrying handle. There was no red window in the back for counting exposures. There was no catch to open it, and it hadn’t got a winding key, so I looked at the top, at the back. There was a full-width slot about an eighth of an inch wide.
      I knew what this was for but I innocently asked the stallholder: “Er, how do you wind the film on?” He took it, turned it over and over a couple of times, shrugged and said: “Don’t know. Perhaps it’s just a display model. 50p if you’re interested.” I was, and put it in my bag.
     Later, in the market café, I took it out and pulled the back off. Inside the back was printed in red: “No. 2 Film Pack Hawk-Eye, 2 ¼ x 3 ¼ Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, N.Y.” Well well, I didn’t know that Kodak made any film pack box cameras. Back home I looked in Brian Coe’s book. The No.2 Film Pack Hawk-Eye was made from 1922 to 1925, at a time when film packs were a moderately popular alternative to glass plates.
     It’s got the usual flip-flop shutter with T setting, and two tiny frosted-glass reflecting viewfinders. Despite the name Hawk-Eye, I can’t believe that this was made as a promotions give-away. Not made from metal pressings. Anyway, I can’t imagine any company buying lots of film-pack box cameras to give away in a promotion. I wouldn’t think they’d get a sufficient number of takers. Unfortunately, Coe listed it in an appendix and didn’t give any indication of production numbers, so I searched on the internet. I found several on collectors’ sites, and even an instruction manual on kyphoto. I also found one listed by a dealer for the equivalent of £32. Where have I been all these years?
Back to top of page