Three Decades of Lomo: We Interview The Lomography Founders

I went to meet the founders of Lomography, Sally Bibawy and Matthias Fiegl, on an unseasonably warm Halloween morning in Brooklyn. For three decades, this unicorn of a company has maintained an unwavering commitment to analog long before analog’s recent renaissance, and I was eager to uncover what has fueled their commitment, what currently drives them, and how it might shape Lomography’s future.

The office had a frenetic energy befitting a company that places high value on its customers’ creative output. While Lomography operated brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. during the pre-COVID era, they've now downsized to a single DUMBO office—but not for lack of success. They chose to step back from showcasing their products to focus on what really matters: the art you create. With books piled high, large prints, developed film strips hanging, cameras on every surface, and a cluster of happy employees willing to show you anything from their wall of products, Lomography's North American office felt less like a corporate office and more like a Wonka factory for film photography.

Sally and Matthias were simply and smartly dressed, and it was easy to picture them 30 years earlier as fresh-faced art students stumbling into a Czech camera store, only to discover the Lomo LC-A, a Russian copycat camera designed for the communist masses. That camera then inspired their idea of democratizing film photography, and the seeds for the present-day Lomography business were planted.

Preferring to let the photos speak for themselves, when I asked Sally and Matthias a series of questions about the business, their answers contained almost none of the salesmanship I was used to, instead answering with a kind of hurried enthusiasm, as if to say, “We will definitely take a moment to talk about our passion for photography, but we also have creating to do.”

The Early Days

“We were heavy underground, but the art scene loved us,” Sally recalled of Lomography’s early days in a new era of collaboration and experimentation. Electricity was in the air, and cameras were in the hands of more people. But when I wondered how Lomography’s mission might have changed 30 years later, Matthias stressed that the company stayed the same while everything around them changed. In the beginning, Lomo was considered a fast-paced “wild style” of photography, eschewing formality for the company’s newly minted “Ten Golden Rules” that encouraged experimentation, even to the extent of shooting without the viewfinder.

But now Lomography has taken on an unofficial role as a film preservation society, something neither Sally nor Matthias took lightly. When suppliers insisted that the future (and profit) lay in digital over analog production, Sally singled this out as the turning point in their resolve to “keep production up because once they shut down, it’s gone… the knowledge is gone.”

Keeping Film Formats Alive

Currently, Lomography is the only place to find 110 film, which Sally referred to as their responsibility to keep film formats alive and the cost down. “When you add film to the ecosystem,” Matthias chimed in, “a lot of cameras suddenly work, and you have a lot more creativity out there… every lens is different, every film format is different, every film is different… this is the beauty of analog photography, this extreme amount of variation.”

According to Sally, the Lomography approach hinges on the belief that “if you want to speak to people who grew up in a digital age and don't know about analog photography… you cannot send them expensive products… they won't jump on that train.” Affordable gear strips away barriers and allows for experimentation, urging people to get creatively messy and try things they otherwise might not, like 110 snapshots, gel-soaked double exposures, fisheye photos, and sprocket panoramas.

The Petzval Lens' Hollywood Debut

Lomography’s creativity thrives on its openness to new ideas, replacing what may be the stale “5-year plan” in a traditional company. As Matthias recalls, “Somebody came to us who uses the Petzval lens on large format and asked if we could make it for a regular camera.” With its iconic swirly bokeh and Viennese roots, the niche lens was a natural fit for Lomography, which quickly launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to revive it just as mirrorless cameras were making it easier to experiment with unconventional lenses. Filmmakers quickly took notice—last year, Robbie Ryan used rehoused Petzval lenses on his Arricam for Poor Things, explaining to IBC how "the focus is all over the place, and the center usually is the only thing that’s in focus... It creates really beautiful swirly optics.” As a result, Poor Things looked like no other film that year."

Yet with such a democratic mission statement, I couldn't help but wonder if Lomography’s time in the Hollywood spotlight would tempt them to divert resources toward higher-end lenses, crafted with big-budget cinematographers in mind. “Professionals and famous photographers were using our products, and even tried to disassemble and re-house them for professional use,” Sally told me, “and we knew we could do it better.” Despite my prodding after what seemed to be a clear acknowledgment of future lens development, specifics about upcoming projects were elusive—though Sally did confirm that Lomography is aware of its new Hollywood audience and is “working on a lot of projects for next year.”

Home Cooking

Once it was clear that my inquisitive intentions were pure, I was invited to look through schematics and a demo video on Matthias’ phone of a new prototype for a daylight film development box. Visually reminiscent of a ramen soup bowl, Lomography’s forthcoming release will allow virtually anyone with access to development chemicals to process their film at home. In conjunction with Lomography film and the DigitaLIZA (which allows you to effortlessly scan to digital), this home developer will complete what Matthias calls “a Lomo ecosystem,” affordable and approachable for nearly everyone, which couldn’t be more true to the values Lomography launched with 30 years earlier.

Bringing Everything Into Focus

Some of my questions seemed silly or irrelevant to Sally and Matthias, and after spending time with them and understanding the core of their business, I felt silly for having asked those questions. I had wondered whether Hollywood’s notice and recent enthusiasm over glass-lensed versions of the Lomo’Instant Wide and Lomomatic 110 might push the company to switch over for good to the “superior” (but really, “safer”) optics of glass. Of course, this missed the point entirely. “We come from glass,” explained Sally (referring to the LC-A), “and there was a very strong character coming from the Russian glass Minitar lens,” but that was not the point of the camera. Lomography immediately followed up with the “extreme plastic” Action Sampler, realizing the beauty is in the uniqueness of the result.

Not every product Lomography creates is a commercial success, and hence sales have almost nothing to do with a product’s fate. The LomoKino is just about the wildest product in the Lomography lineup—one I’ve never actually seen in the wild—but Sally and Matthias see it as their crown jewel. It takes a standard 35mm roll of film, and using a hand crank, lets you create mini-movies, exposing four landscape images vertically in what is meant to be one standard 35mm frame. And just like the Petzval lens, there’s a cult following of people trying to modify it to attach larger film rolls or achieve higher frame rates.

When I asked Sally and Matthias about their favorite product, or one they would want to keep on them all the time, both of them mentioned the LC-A out of obligation. But really, nothing represents their pioneering spirit like the LomoKino. In a world of sameness, it’s an incredible breath of fresh air. So after all my questioning about the future, I realized that it almost doesn’t matter what gear will be coming next from Lomography… they will build it solely because they want to see what you are going to create with it.

“From the beginning,” Sally said, “we always aimed to show the result rather than explaining too much. That's why we put books in the packaging and involve our community with tips and tricks.” The biggest takeaway is that Lomography wants you to share your work. We circled back so many times to their website and the idea of sharing the art you create with Lomography products. Matthias said that every week 20,000 photos are uploaded and tagged on the Lomography website, and this—more than any singular piece of gear—was a source of pride for the founders.

Again, Lomography has not changed, but the world around them has. Their website has simply become the 2024 incarnation of the Lomo gallery movement that started 30 years prior. Sally left us with a charming story of a butcher who in the early days told them, “After I read about you, I emptied my space, and my friends did a Lomo exhibition.” Today that butcher could not only display his work in his shop but share it instantly across the whole world. Though Lomography has done its best to remain unchanged amid the shifting photographic landscape, the Lomo movement has never been stronger, in large part due to the ever-growing world around it.