Fuji Cardia
simplicity

This camera, too, was a gift – from the same friend who brought the OM10 and the old SV. He gave it to Yaemi as a going-away present, and she used it in at least three different countries for over ten years. In the end, it came crashing down after a cat.
With two (fairly wide-angle) lens lengths and a simple array of functions, the Cardia is a well-made automatic camera. If one uses it carefully and sticks to the sort of image it does best, it will do a good job. In our experience it did best with 100 or 200 rated films, and was good with flowers and plants – although it was a bit picky about close focus images. The flash turned all it touched into a scene from a police interrogation room.

Records of city life, and the seasons

The selection below covers four or five different cities in two different countries, with about six years separating the earliest and latest images.

The Cardia was a really useful camera to have around: small enough to drop in your pocket, and capable of producing some very attractive exposures. We enjoyed recording a series of seasonal images when we were members of the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in Vancouver – four of which are reproduced below.
There are always little scenes at the edges of our travels which we want to record and take with us. If they succeed, they take on a narrative quality and a life independent of the original moment. Photographs don’t really ‘record’ images from life: they create and transform; they become units of independent meaning. Which is not to say that what they mean is always terribly important, or that they render false something that was true in life.

Not long ago, the Cardia took a spill in a tight spot, just after the cat emerged from the bath. A tiny little pin meant to hook the back cover to the body snapped off. And thus the camera’s useful life came to an end.

Date posted: 2005-07-02