Photo: © The Minox Files
With its 8x11 mm frame, the Minox camera produces the smallest negatives in analog photography. To load his Minox camera, photographer Mark van den Brink (Netherlands, 1965) cut the plastic film to size by hand. He bought the camera believing that, like a voyeur, he could photograph the world around him unobtrusively—even from an easy chair. The Minox Files is the result of an innovative photographic process.
While studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Mark van den Brink became fascinated by the distortion, rough texture, and imperfections created when making darkroom prints. They felt natural to the way he saw the world.
During a journey through the Alps, he experimented by attaching his camera to binoculars or a telescope, making the mountains feel close and yet even farther away at the same time.
The first product to bear the Minox name was a subminiature camera, conceived as early as 1922 in Riga and later invented and produced by Baltic German Walter Zapp in 1936. From 1937 through 1943, the Minox camera was manufactured by the Latvian company VEF (Valstselektrotehniskā fabrika).
After World War II, however, the camera was redesigned and production began in Germany. Walter Zapp originally intended the Minox to be a camera anyone could use, especially people new to photography. Nevertheless, its prohibitively high production costs soon led Minox to become more widely associated with a luxury gadget for amateur photographers.
Soon afterward—and not surprisingly—it joined the world of espionage as a spy camera. The ultralight aluminum device, measuring 80x27x16 mm, could easily be concealed in clothing, hollow books, bags, and suitcases. During the Cold War, intelligence agencies used Minox cameras to make snapshots of secret documents and maps.
The number of films featuring this tiny spy camera is seemingly endless. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), for example, James Bond used a Minox to covertly record the locations of agents carrying deadly biological weapons.
The Minox – Mark van den Brink
Pages: 384
Price: €39.50
Publisher: Van Zoetendaal
ISBN: 9789072532497
