It was late in the afternoon on Sept. 1 when my father asked me to take a photograph of him and my mother in their backyard. The light was warm but slightly harsh, the kind where you squint and look away to offset the intensity. It was a gorgeous late summer day where hints of autumn start to break through, and my dad was feeling good. It was his birthday.
They retreated to the shade of the overgrown wall opposite the house. He put his arm around her, leaned his head close to hers, and they smiled into my lens, a Fujinon 18mm f/2. There’s a mandate when I photograph my family, aim high and slightly down with the upper mid torso as the cutoff. Rules are made to be broken, and I often have, thought it was a special occasion so I listened.
I quickly adjusted the settings, a menagerie of dials and buttons that are a hallmark of Fujifilm’s cameras, focused, and pressed the shutter. After that one, I thought perhaps we could benefit from another. It’s always better to photograph more, than to photograph less, usually, and as I went to raise the camera, existential dread crash landed in the backyard.
The lens made the metallic zzhhh-zzzhhhh-zzhhk sound when it’s trying to find something to focus on. The screen blacked out and came back to some inverted version of life with a banner message, a white exclamation mark framed in a blood red rectangle alongside “TURN OFF THE CAMERA AND TURN ON AGAIN.”
So I did, only to hear the same mechanical whirring and see the same awful message. I took out the battery and put it back. No change. I disconnected the lens and reconnected it. No change. SD card out, SD card in. No change.
Any hope of one more photograph was gone. It is perhaps fitting that the image the bookended my camera’s long, winding life was of my parents’ joy and love for each other.
In the car on the way to dinner, I tried triaging the X-Pro1’s grievous mortal wound, only to come up against an apparent consensus that that particular error message is indicative of something probably very tricky to repair, if it can be repaired at all.
I gave up on my search and let myself feel the grief. In the grand scheme of things, a device failing is a small loss, but it is a loss nonetheless.
That X-Pro1 came into my life just before the start of my career in photography. I was in grad school for journalism in 2014, in the second of three semesters when I committed $1249 to three eBay purchases: the camera for $600, the 35mm f/1.4 for $450, and the 27mm f/2.8 for $199. The 18mm came later via a friend.
It felt like a statement piece. The X-Pro1 was the company’s second foray in its X family of cameras. Released in 2012, it was a followup to the wildly popular fixed lens X100. It was a rangefinder-style interchangeable lens phenom that could aesthetically compete with Leica for a fraction of the price. If it didn’t have to be in my bag, it wasn’t. It’s the kind of camera you want to show off. It is worth mentioning that I was deeply green then, and it would be a while before I was making images worth anything with it.
Some photographers are fairly loath to talk about gear, as if it’s somehow beneath them. I’d attended a talk some number of years ago given by a photographer from a prestigious agency, and during the Q&A, a woman asked about which cameras he uses. He scoffed at the question.
I imagine the hesitance surrounding the gear talk stems from the fact that photography is almost entirely reliant on the tool. It is as technical as it is artistic. Without the camera, we’re people who just know how to see, keen-eyed observers of life.
I relish the gear talk. If it can take a picture, I’m interested. My purchase of the X-Pro1 capped an eBay spending spree in which I scooped up a bunch of mostly nonfunctional, but very pretty Yashicas. Years later at home, I would happen upon a Fujifilm FinePix a350, a tiny .2-megapixel point-and-shoot with a zoom lens that was released in 2005. It couldn’t do most things, but what it could produce with its tiny but mighty sensor and surprisingly strong flash was a revelation. It did finally give out, though I don’t mourn it in the way I mourn the X-Pro1.
In digging through archives, I was reminded that I actually came awfully close to selling the X-Pro1 and the few lenses I had. It was late in 2015, about a year and a half into my time with it, and I was desperately in need of money. I was living overseas in Istanbul, and my freelance career was floundering. The eBay listing didn’t get any bites, and that was, perhaps, a sign that it was supposed to be in my life a good while longer.
It’s been with me every step of the way in my winding career. It was a workhorse during my reporting trips to Greece at the height of the refugee crisis. It was with me at the protests that swept New York City with the advent of the previous administration. It was in my bag at my first staff photographer job at a small community newspaper in the Bronx.
Yet, it did, eventually, take a backseat.
The better you get, the more your tastes change. How you use a tool, and what you need out of that tool also changes. As time passed, the X-Pro1’s flaws became more glaring, even as it produced beautiful images with sumptuous, vivid colors that have distinguished the varieties of X cameras.
The X-Pro1 was in an imperfect marriage with a Sony a77 Mark II, a perfectly capable prosumer camera, that pulled double duty with a 16-50mm f/2.8 and a relic telephoto zoom — a Minolta 70-210mm f/4. There was a Sony NEX-6 in that mix with a 24mm f/1.8, another perfectly fine camera that looked like a piece of piping ripped out of the wall. Taken together, it was akin to looking at plumbing held together by tape and gum. It’ll get ya there, but just barely.
For about a solid year, from 2017 into 2018, I saved up the money I made from a string of wedding jobs in a jar that I couldn’t touch until I had enough to move into the fast lane with a Canon 5D Mark IV. The money-in-jar practice continued, more or less, until there was a 5D Mark III, a 24-70mm f/2.8 and a 70-200mm f/2.8, the quintessential photojournalist’s kit and the bane of my back’s existence.
The X-Pro1, by this time, had entered a state of dormancy. I was working at a level that was above what it could handle. In combing through my archive to put together a chronological best-of from every year, I found that I apparently didn’t take any pictures with it in 2018 and 2019. It is in the last couple of years that I’ve pulled it out of semi-retirement in a bid to get closer to photography as a source of joy.
Rather than a cause for frustration, the glaring flaws became a call for patience. The “worse” a camera is, the more fun it is to use because the thrill is in the limitations. That’s where the true creativity lives — within, around, and beyond the constraints.
Early in 2015, when I was overseas, I was working a job that wasn’t exactly what I wanted, and the joy had dissipated. I needed to reclaim it. The only time I had to myself was my commute to and from the job. Commuting in Istanbul was my window into the lives of all the people around me, and I photographed with Hipstamatic on my iPhone 5. They were by no means technically impressive photographs, but they had soul.
Likewise, with the X-Pro1, I needed to slow down in order to get the most out of it.
And so there I was composing a portrait of my parents, the people who brought me into being, with the very same camera that brought me into being as a photographer.
So it’s lights out for the X-Pro1. It’ll join those mostly non-functional, but very pretty Yashicas on the shelf. An artifact of my history of seeing.