I have a wispy memory of a trip my family took to Mexico in 1980, when I was six years old. I remember a town square, an old man, and a home made camera. The camera was a huge wooden box that the man would stick his arm in and after a while, a ghostly black and white image was produced. Many years later after I had gotten into photography, I asked around wondering if someone had heard of such a camera or if my memory was a child’s fantasy. No one had heard of such a thing, so I chalked it up to a fertile imagination. Until I came upon an article titled “The Cuban Polaroid”. It was a wooden box with the bellows and lens from a folding camera mounted at one end with a complete darkroom inside.

Using photographic printing paper the photographer would expose a sheet of paper for the negative, develop, stop, and fix it inside the camera, then put a copy stand on the camera and photograph the negative (to obtain a positive), develop, stop, and fix, then wash the final print in a coffee can of water attached to his homemade tripod:


This information was discovered in a doctor’s waiting room in a random magazine in the dark pre-internet days, so for years I called it a “Cuban Polaroid”.  Fast forward 15 years. One day (about three months ago) I start crack-googling. “Cuban Polaroid”, nothing. “Homemade instant camera”, nope. “Itinerant photographer”, bingo. As near as I can tell, this crazy box camera started as a way to make money during the early part of the 20th century.

Note processing tank jutting from camera body. The “sleeve” lets you reach into the camera without light reaching the sensitized paper.

The Chicago Ferrotype Co. started making “postcard cameras” sometime around 1913. This was a direct positive camera. Meaning you used a sheet of paper with a blank postcard printed on the back, (so you could mail it to Grandma), made an exposure and then slid the paper into a single chemical bath that would completely process the print. This provided a print without the need for a negative.

This was not the first instance of the in-camera darkroom, it was first used in the “Dubroni No. 1″, in 1865.

Dubroni No. 1 (note the rubber bulb to insert and extract chemicals.  The inside of the camera was lined with porcelain.)

Starting around 1913 you could buy multiple cameras, and then try to hock them to regular Joe’s as a way to make money, or try to sell multiple cameras to one guy, so he could sell them.  It was a kind of pyramid marketing scheme by Chicago Ferrotype.  Before the Great Depression it was common for photographers, both mighty and low, to wander from town to town, taking photos of people and getting paid on the spot, with resort towns being of special interest to them. So if you went to a resort town with 10 of these postcard cameras, you could probably convince locals to pony up some cash for a chance at “$2,000 to $5,000” profit. (For the record, I don’t think anyone ever made two G’s with this camera, circa 1913.) However, many people used (and still use) instant cameras to support their families .  If you’ve read my earlier post about club photography, you know why this fascinates me.

Photographer in Veracruz using pack film Polaroids with home made bodies.  But I digress.

Unfortunately the Chicago Ferrotype Co. went out of business. No longer able to acquire the special paper and chemicals, photographers had to get creative. They took bellows and lens’s from second hand cameras and mounted them on boxes fitted with trays inside for all their chemicals.

This explains the process. Click to enlarge.

These home made cameras often doubled as billboard to display their wares. The cameras themselves often becoming what I would call folk art.

These kinds of camera’s are still in use in Brazil and Afghanistan, In fact government ID cards in Afghanistan are taken by these cameras in the poorer areas.  Photos cost about one US dollar.


Front cover of the magazine SYSTEM "D" March 1956.

Advertised as a “portable studio suitable for the tourist trade, garden parties, fairs, and seaside resorts.”  The last factory made camera of this type is I believe, the Jano While-U-Wait Postcard Camera, circa 1954.

That is, if you dont count the Kookie Kamera.


This crazy contraption used similar chemistry as the Mandel, circa 1968.  The copy stand is the tomato soup can.

Here is a modern take on the post card camera.

And of course…

Since this kind of camera is almost unknown on the English speaking web, most all of the information I have acquired about these interesting cameras has been filtered through Google Translate, so I dont know if all of it is correct.  These cameras dont show up on the used market because the are generally used till they fall apart.  I would like to make one of these myself, so if any of you wonderful people out there in intertube land knows anything about these cameras, please contact me.  I am not going to talk about my post-apocalyptic fantasy about going out in the wilderness with one of these bad boys, earning a warrior-photographers living in the wasteland…..

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