Monday, March 26, 2012

Digging Into Vintage Adding Machines With Kevin Twomey

Kevin Twomey is creating quite a name for himself with his photography of vintage adding machines. What his photographs help to portray is the mechanical complexity to which numbers could be added up to infinity, through a physical and extravagantly designed solution. This setup was commonplace for many decades and now with the advent of hi tech computing these mechanical devices have gone the way of the dinosaur due to their singular function, weight and inability to compete in today's market place of apps on mini computers.

Check out more of Kevin Twomey's work

Kevin Twomey's photo of a vintage Adding Machine


They may seem like Rube Goldberg machines today, but mechanical adding machines were considered the closest thing to computers not long ago: heaps of gears, levers, and springs engineered to do the work of a $3 calculator. The San Francisco–based photographer Kevin Twomey has produced a wonderful series of these mechanical relics, selected from a collector’s private stash.

“The community of people who collect this cumbersome, not-so-valuable, obsolete machinery is pretty small,” Twomey tells Co.Design. Nonetheless, his research quickly led him to Mark Glusker, a collector and mechanical engineer living just a few miles from the photographer’s studio who agreed to bring over a few prized pieces. “As we laid them out on tables, Mark pulled off the covers on some of the machines to show me the guts,” Twomey recalls. “Instantly I knew what this project was about: the intricate and complex inner workings of these machines.”

Kevin Twomey's photos show the depth and soul of a vintage adding machine
He used hot lights to illuminate the details: “Arri hot lights have a crispness about them, so when objects like these machines are bathed in that kind of light, they just sing,” he says. And his affection for vintage technology extends to his own choice of equipment: a Hasselblad. “I am still in love with the older Carl Zeiss lenses.”


Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine
Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine
Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine
Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine