The Minolta Autocord is an oblong box with three knobs on one side and a fold-up crank on the other. Take the uppermost knob, the one with the slightly concave stainless steel surface, and force the fleshy fingerprint of your thumb and pointer under its tight edge. Or if you can stand it, use your nails. The movement is too subtle to be felt, but there's a loud hollow pop and the back of the camera, an L-shaped gate, swings open.
Like so many cameras, the space behind the lens is a box of trapezoids expanding toward the user. They are hard plastic ruffled to suggest the shape of the soft bellows of a camera 80 years older.
All 120 format cameras exchange film spools like white elephants. Yank on the knurled surface of the knob below the first one and twist it. The empty spool will rattle around but it will not fall out. I have not yet discovered a way to take the spool out in a deft motion. Fiddle with it until it comes. There's one remaining knob. Yank it and twist it and insert the empty spool. Run the knurling between your thumb and pointer until you feel the metal post pop into the Phillips-head divot in the spool.
Take your new roll of film and tear the tape holding it together. 120 film is rolled with opaque backing paper. Shove, there's no deft way to do it, the loaded spool into the upper spool holder and pop the knob back in. Pull out four inches from the spool, letting it spin in place and insert the end of the paper in the slot on the empty spool.
Unfold the crank and turn it. The empty spool will draw the backing paper across the back of the camera like a conveyor. Turn and turn until the black arrow printed on the backing paper appears. Slow down and turn until the arrow points to the red dot.
Snap the back of the camera shut. If you did it right, the little window next to the crank will display a red triangle. Turn the crack again and keep turning. The red triangle will move like an hour hand and slowly rotate away to be replaced with a dot, and then another dot, and another, until a sans-serif 1 appears and the crank stops on a dime. Rotate the crank back 80 degrees and fold it back.
Like a human, the Minolta has binocular vision. The Minolta's eyes are stacked one atop the other. A human's left and right eyes each see a slightly different view, and the brain merges those views to give the illusion of three dimensions. Only one of the Minolta's eyes is connected to a brain. Flip open the camera's lid, pop up the magnifying glass, and peer into the viewfinder. Look at the world in f/3.2. The foreground is a prominent island in a sea of blurred colors. The lenses in your eyes are just like those in the camera, but your brain spares you the blurry edges of your vision.
Two eyes, only one with a brain. The film stretched across two spools scribes an image in billions of microscopic grains of silver.
While I was waiting for my Minolta to come in the mail I used to walk down to where two bridges ran in parallel over the river. One of the bridges had a sidewalk. The other was the interstate.
Walk seven paces on the sidewalk on the left side of the bridge and look towards the open spandrels below the interstate. If you do it right you should see, beyond the open air above the river, a prismic corridor of I-beam triangles.
I would imagine the camera there perched on the tripod. It would point toward that corridor like a headless halo, and I would be nowhere to be seen.
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