Yaxcopol, Mexico
All photos © Jose Villa
Jose Villa—a film-based, fine-art wedding and portrait photographer in Solvang, California—has been working on a book project on Holga images for the past eight years. All of the photos above were taken in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Campeche, Mexico
Uxmal, Mexico
Becal, Yucatan, Mexico
Campeche, Mexico
thanks for the feature PDN!! you inspire me!
Mr. Villa’s images are carefully composed but I wonder if he’d would have created a more useful photograph had he used a 6×6 camera with a really decent lens?
I don’t own a Holga and I wonder why do we have to downgrade our photography with lenses that ages ago would have been throwaways.
Have we become jaded with the great technological advances created for us that we have to resort to “play cameras” to make interesting photography?
@Rafael It’s an effort to escape all the mega-pixels and digital this and that and get back to the essence of photography which is just the image as organic and simple as can be. That’s what the feeling of using a toy camera is all about.
Also, it’s how many people got involved in photography to begin with. It was never about the camera but it has become all about the “technology” today and it’s sad. Jose’s images bring back the fun in looking through something that has a button and a plastic viewfinder and that’s all. It then becomes only about composition, or color or contrast. I think if anything, it makes you a better photographer shooting with such extreme tech limitations.
:-)