An unpredictable "toy camera". The Holga 120 N is known as the Plastic Fantastic and has quite a cult following. Results can vary as the camera is not only fully plastic (even the lens) but it is fully mechanical with no battery. It has a distinctive look that includes aspects of chance. Fun. Unpredictable. Undeniably distinct in it's own way.
Embedded Files
Origin Story
I keep the Holga 120N on the shelf where the good china should go. It’s a toy camera with a lunchbox soul—plastic lens, duct-tape spine, a red window that blinks like a sleepy brake light. That’s where Ol’ Tater lives. Part human spirit, part potato. He says the vegetable half fogged his real name “like a cloud scootin’ over the sun,” then shrugs like that’s life.
First roll I ran through him came back with honest-to-goodness light leaks shaped exactly like french fries. Grease-yellow streaks, little ridges and everything. The vignettes looked like a fryer basket was lowering over the world. Annie sniffed the drying negatives and gave me a look like, “Buddy, your film smells like dirt.” I said, “It’s a long story.” She yawned.
Ol’ Tater’s cosmology goes like this: “Everything’s got a spirit. Even rocks gots ’em. It’s all vibration. Rocks hardly shake, so their spirits are, you know, less… spirity.” He’ll tap the Holga with a plastic tock and add, “Me, I got mixed up with a legume.”
“Tubers, dear,” Mama Minny corrects, taking him gently by the elbow. “Potatoes are tubers.”
“Right. I am two-thirds tuber,” he agrees solemnly, then winks at me through the viewfinder. “Round up.”
He doesn’t remember much from being alive. Says he might’ve farmed—has flashes of callused hands, a field under August sky, a tractor seat warm as a skillet. Then the memories switch and he’s snug under soil, all eyes, counting the thumps of rain on the dirt roof. “Coziest I ever been,” he sighs, dreamy. Other days he swears he sees the inside of a McDonald’s—tile bright, tray wobbling—and he’s eating fries too fast, laughing alone at something on the placemat maze. “Choked on joy,” he says. “Happens.”
Best any of us can figure, something jammed in the spirit-works that day: a man on one side, a potato on the other, both sliding down the same chute at the exact wrong moment. The camera that caught him—some disposable job—broke in a glove box years later. He seeped into the next camera he could find, and the next. That’s how he wound up in my Holga, because toy cameras are built for miracles and misfires.
He’s a curious one, which is a good trait in a ghost and a dangerous one in a potato. He’ll ask, “Why’s the sky so heavy today?” or “Is a shadow the picture the dark took of you?” Then he’ll mistake a lens cap for a cookie and I’ll hear Mama Minny in the next room: “Honey, no.” She gives him little lessons—aperture, snack storage, stranger danger—and he nods dutifully, then forgets half of it and remembers the part about snacks.
Penelope and he get along like cousins at a picnic. Both a little sideways, both fond of peeking. They sit together on the shelf and whisper about fuzziness and tongues of paper. I’ll catch a print oozing out of Penelope’s Polaroid, edges warm as toast, and there in the corner is a faint sprout, as if the image might root if I left it on the windowsill. “We’re practicing seeing,” Penelope tells me. “It’s a little fuzzy.” Tater pats the Holga. “We’re working up to crispy.”
Gus just watches with that strongman patience. When Ol’ Tater gets tangled in the camera strap, Gus frees him with two careful fingers and a back-slap that rattles the film door. “You’ll get there, spud.” Tater beams. “Already halfway.”
Shooting with him is an adventure. The Holga frame will overlap itself on a whim, turning two moments into a three-legged race. The corners go dark like a stage curtain that forgot its cue. Sometimes a light leak streaks across a portrait, a bright ketchup comet. An ordinary fence goes mythic. A Kroger cart becomes a wagon train. People look… rooted, like the ground is remembering them in real time.
He likes dirt roads, farmers’ markets, sacks of seed potatoes he calls “the cousins.” He’ll beg to photograph a sack, then get shy and ask me to do it for him. His voice, when it comes through the shutter, is soft as a shovel in loam. “Steady, J. Let the sun do most of the work. Folks are 80% sunshine anyway.”
Now and then, something sad sneaks through. The frame goes quiet. A diner booth appears with no one in it, just a paper hat abandoned on Formica. He’ll whisper, “I had friends once,” then brighten. “Still do.” He means us—the messy, loving heap of Spirit Craft. Minny sets out a peppermint. Penelope slides him a glossy square with a doodled smiley face. Gus offers to carry him to the car. We don’t say the word lonely. We load another roll.
I asked him once what he wants most. He thought so long I wondered if tubers hibernate. Then he said, “To be useful. A good man should be useful. A good potato should be mashed, fried, roasted—whatever the meal needs.” He paused. “Me, I can be a picture. That’s supper enough.”
So I pack the Holga with gaffer tape and hope, and we walk the northern Kentucky afternoon, Annie trotting, sky mild as dishwater. We point at ordinary things and make them stranger, kinder. Ol’ Tater hums in the chassis, a little off-key, a little off everything, and we love him all the more.
When the prints dry, I label the sleeve: Ol’ Tater—Fields & Fries. He peers up from the contact sheet, delighted at every accident. “Look at us,” he says. “Half man, half spud, whole picture.”
And he’s right. He’s a good man—the part that’s a man. And a good potato. The part that’s a potato. The miracle is you can be both and still fit inside a toy camera with a lunchbox soul.
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