“The Camera Man’s Camera”

Paging through the March 2024 installment of Sky and Telescope magazine, which arrived at my home a week or two ago, what strikes me most about the advertising that appears in it is the near total lack of any copy. With some notable exceptions, vendors typically coax prospective customers by using big and colorful pictures that dominate a spread, some kind of tightly-written slogan, and perhaps a website URL. And that’s it.

Curious to see what the back cover of Sky and Telescope looked like exactly 70 years ago, I consulted the twelve issues from 1954 that sit on my bookshelf. “Scientists Acclaim Unitron Refractors,” proclaims the headline on the back cover of the March issue, and the ensuing copy explains this to the reader in more detail.

I was first drawn to paging through those old magazines primarily because of my fascination with Questar’s long-running advertising campaign in several magazines including Sky and Telescope. Before his death in 1965, Lawrence Braymer, Questar’s founder, masterfully wrote the copy that accompanied most if not all of his company’s advertisements. Often with dense blocks of text, he explained how revolutionary catadioptric telescopes were, how demanding it was to produce them, and how much enjoyment the user would gain by owning one.

I suppose it was natural, then, that my growing interest in film photography would also lead me to an interest in how photography gear was marketed generations ago. Paging through old issues of Modern Photography magazine on archive.org, my eye is often drawn to the Nikon ads that appeared there.

A niche within a niche, collecting Nikon promotional brochures has also become something of a casual sub-hobby for me. It’s a relatively cheap thing that I indulge in—cheap, that is, just as long as I limit myself to it every now and again. After all, it’s easy for stuff like this to amass in both volume and cost.

Using the collection of Nikon literature that Pacific Rim Camera has in its online reference library for clues on what’s out there, I sometimes run searches on Etsy or eBay to see what I can find.

A few days ago, I found a tranche of mid-1960s Nikon literature that appeared roughly during the same period that most of my Nikon gear dates from. The purse strings loosened that day, and I succumbed to temptation.

What struck me upon paging through those pieces for the first time was the way in which Nikon still seemed engaged in an effort to explain the advantages of the SLR to owners of older-style rangefinder cameras. Perhaps it was those stalwart photographers who Nikon worked the hardest to convince.

Nikon made its case with a stylistic flourish that one simply doesn’t see in marketing copy anymore. On its first page, the brochure entitled “Nikon F: The Complete System Approach to 35mm Photography” immediately taps into the reader’s imagination:

The Nikon F is so closely identified with the professional user, it has come to be known as ‘the camera man’s camera’. Yet, in a larger sense, the Nikon F is for every man moved by the urge to express himself creatively, who has found fulfillment through photography. And it is especially for the man to whom fine equipment is in itself a source of gratification with the knowledge that its quality goes hand-in-hand with the inevitable quality he will enjoy in the results.

(Buying a new “quality” camera won’t “inevitably” make you into a better photographer. I hear that all the time and believe it fully, but never mind that for now.)

In the paragraphs that follow, Nikon describes what it feels like to experience a Nikon F in hand. With a phrasing style that emotionally draws the reader in, one could scarcely help but read on and learn exactly what this incredible machine did.

The language is rather dated, of course. It’s a product of its time. But that aside, I do confess that it effectively conveys what it’s actually like to shoot with a Nikon F.

A camera man who used the camera man’s camera was also quite possibly an automobile man who drove the automobile man’s automobile. Browsing old car brochures is yet another rabbit hole I sometimes fall into. Fortunately, there’s a website for that: oldcarbrochures.com, where one can enjoy all manner of marketing pieces without having to collect them. This online assemblage is impressive, to say the least. Its depth and breath matches the formidable size of, say, a 1965 Cadillac two-door.

Like most others, I’m not a fan of advertising in its modern form. Being hit over the head with obnoxious TV commercials that come close to inducing epilepsy, web page banner and pop-up ads that blot out content and cause the page to load slowly and inefficiently, incessant lightboxes with invitations to sign up for even more advertising delivered right to your email inbox, and so forth: at risk of sounding like a grouchy curmudgeon, I must say it has numbed all of us rather thoroughly. And it’s just annoying. With its in-your-face approach, modern advertising, it seems, has lost something of its artistic dimension that it used to have decades ago.