Holding the Camera

Artist Alberto Vieceli compiles the strange, humorous and aslant images designed to teach a neophyte camera user how to use their new device

Before one’s camera was one’s phone, the camera makers of the world had to explain the possible uses of their product in the space of a few pages of a user’s manual. How one tilts the camera, holds it with both hands in front of the waist. How one looks through the viewfinder, gazes one-eyed into the world. How one hides it in stockings, behind the back, and how one lets it peep out from behind the corner of a building, as though he or she were a detective.

Holding the Camera shows a pictorial genre from the now extinct era of analog photography. These images that were once distributed a million times over in instructions and advertisements, had almost entirely disappeared from culture, until now.